October 22, 2004

L.T. “Phone home”

Unique theft recovery solution for stolen
laptop computers

By Rick Dexter
Special to the Times

Next to PDAs, laptop computers are probably the most commonly lost and stolen pieces of computer equipment. They are easy for thieves to snatch off of desks, abundant at airports, schools and coffee shops, and often left unattended during meetings, breaks or lunch hours. With auction services like eBay creating a global fencing market, it’s also easy for someone to dispose of them quickly for cash. I’ve seen many situations where employees have simply lost their company notebooks, and I’ve also been involved in a case or two where they were later recovered at the employee’s home. In larger companies with high turnover, it’s quite common for a disorganized or busy IT department to lose track of laptops as they shuffle among employees.

For years, I’ve wondered if laptop manufacturers could install some sort of “beacon” in laptops so that they can be tracked down whenever they are missing or stolen. A company called Absolute Software is doing just that. Their product, Computrace, is designed to sit quietly in your laptop’s operating system, quickly checking in with Absolute’s servers once a day over the Internet just to make sure all is well. After you report your laptop missing, the servers will instruct Computrace to wake up and start sending data that can be used to trace the laptop as soon as it is plugged into a phone line or Internet connection.

The beacon itself is actually a fairly simple technical problem to solve. There are some bigger considerations in laptop recovery that Absolute has also attacked, which is what makes their product appealing. The first is having the beacon survive a reformat or replacement of the notebook’s hard drive. Also, utilizing the information sent by the beacon in order to determine the exact location of the computer is probably the most challenging piece of all.

Absolute has designed Computrace to be able to survive the total erasure of a hard disk drive erase, including a reformat and reload of the operating system. They are also working with laptop manufacturers to include Computrace components in the permanent memory (BIOS) of the laptop, so even if the hard drive is physically replaced, Computrace can still activate itself. While the standard software-based product is very resilient, it’s not completely foolproof. The BIOS support will make it extremely difficult for a thief to circumvent. When you are shopping for a new laptop, make sure and ask your vendor’s sales team about this important feature. Virtually all major laptop vendors have committed to supporting Computrace at the BIOS level early next year.

Most of the value of a Computrace subscription is not in the technology, but in the laptop recovery process. After a missing laptop starts to phone home using an Internet connection or a modem, Absolute Software’s recovery team begins to collect data from the machine. Computrace can transmit basic information such as the internet connection (IP) address or the modem phone number by utilizing caller ID. It also sends more obscure information like keystrokes typed, data from newly created files on the hard drive, and any other information that might be useful in tracking the location of the computer. Recovery analysts at Absolute will piece together all the information they can collect in order to find out where the laptop is located. And here’s the best part: Absolute Software will work directly with law enforcement to obtain any necessary warrants to locate and recover the laptop. Both police and courts are starting to recognize that this technology works, and are taking it seriously.

If a Computrace-protected laptop cannot be recovered after 30 days, Absolute Software will make a $1,000 payment to the laptop owner. This guarantee makes Computrace a very affordable insurance policy for laptops, even if a techno-savvy thief does manage to circumvent the technology. I believe that a very small percentage of laptops would fall into the hands of thieves that are both skilled and organized enough to disable the beacon functionality, so the likelihood of actual recovery is quite high.

Computrace comes as a personal three-year subscription for about $150. Companies can purchase a subscription to expanded versions of Computrace that provide protection for multiple laptops, as well as additional features like asset management of both hardware and software, data recovery services, and remote data wipe services for stolen laptops that might contain sensitive information. IBM and Toshiba are already listing Computrace as an optional line item for laptop orders, and Dell and HP are scheduled to begin offering it next month. Computrace subscriptions can also be purchased directly from the Absolute Web site at www.absolute.com.

Rick Dexter, founder and CEO of NDYNAMICS Network Professionals in Campbell, lives in Almaden. Dexter has over 25 years of experience designing and supporting computer networks, particularly for small businesses and startups seeking reliable and scalable IT infrastructure. If you have a computer question that you would like to have answered in a future column, e-mail it to computerconnection@ndynamics.com.