CrunchGear

I don’t know if they release demographics that put the age/gender/experience level of people in relation to the number of laptop thefts, but my guess would be that it’s mostly the unexperienced people who are affected most by this (and who probably don’t read websites like CG). My mom comes to mind, who (like so many other people) needs to have her passwords somewhere close to where she needs the passwords (because she forgets them), and I wouldn’t be surprised if despite all my efforts she has a textfile on her desktop right now which has a name like “Passwords.txt” and which contains an unencrypted treasure chest that would make any identity thief drool.

Nevertheless, and important post, and I’m not criticizing it at all, actually I think it should somehow find it’s way to the people who really need it (and who barely ever read beyond their Yahoo or MSN start page)!

How about instead of just tagging the devices with labels install anti theft softwares in them? My company bought these softwares for our pda phones, cellphones and laptops from bak2u.

Hi Josh,

Great article. I use LoJack for Laptops and a recovery service called Trackitback (www.trackitback.com). Both of these companies have been excellent to deal with.

Sandra :)

Also look at Trackion as a laptop tracking alternative to Lojack and CyberAngel. I use Trackion which costs only $3 a month. Lojack may come with fancy stickers and CyberAngel may include encryption, but I use other methods along with Trackion to pretty much get the same benefits.

For instance, I use TrueCrypt to set up encrypted drives on my laptop. I also turned on the EFS encryption that is built into Windows XP Professional to encrypt certain settings and software folders and also the folders that I have my TrueCrypt drive volume container files located in to provide two levels of encryption. (You can also get more complicated by also setting access privileges on folder directories to deny access to those folders and files to anyone except for you, but setting access privileges can be tricky.) I also have a 20+ character password for my windows login — that should take forever to break and I also tweaked a registry setting in windows to cause the login to fail and to refuse any input for 30 minutes if an idiot thief keeps trying to input different wrong passwords three times in a row. Even if some crook wipes out my password with some hack and gets in, the Windows built-in EFS encryption (which is keyed to my specific 20+ character password) would defeat that idiot gruntbrain thief from using most of my laptop except maybe the internet — and at that point then the Trackion would provide the information needed to help track down my laptop. And TrueCrypt helps to protect my documents that the gruntbrain wouldn’t be able to find anyways.

For warning stickers that you can put on the laptop, you can sign up for free with Inspice SmartProtec. Just find the built-in Serial Number that you should already have on your laptop. On my HP laptop, the serial number is printed on a label on the bottom of the laptop and the serial number also appears when you go into the BIOS setup of the laptop — either it may appear when some text scrolls on the screen before you actually go into the BIOS or it may appear on a menu screen in the BIOS. Register the laptop’s serial number at Inspice SmartProtec and print up one of their warning stickers on sticker paper and stick that on the laptop. You may even want to use a permanent marker to write the same information somewhere on the back of the laptop or even inside the battery bay area. There are also Ultraviolet Markers that you can buy to write that information on the laptop like on the top of the laptop — whatever you write would be “invisible” to the naked eye but the Police with their CSI-type people could use their ultraviolet flashlights to read whatever ID information that you wrote on the laptop.

Also, remember to set up a password for the Administrator login for when you go into Safe Mode. By default, if you go into Safe Mode, you will find the Adminstrator login has NO password and you can go straight into windows to do whatever you want including setting up windows to give you access to other user accounts on the PC. So set up a password to provide at least a line of defense there.

One other thing to do is to go into the BIOS setup on the laptop, and switch the boot sequence so that the Harddrive boots first, then the CD/DVD, and then the floppy. Otherwise, by default, the boot sequence may be floppy is first, then the CD/DVD drive is second, and then harddrive. If the floppy drive or the CD/DVD drive boots before the harddrive, then anyone can just put a boot floppy or a bootable CD into the drive and use whatever hacking software on the floppy/CD to get to the harddrive.

Note that a lot of laptop protection techniques are to first try to defeat the idiot gruntbrain thief who may steal the laptop to make your laptop unattractive and not suitable for a quick sale to someone else. You can probably expect any thief to want to simply to sell your laptop for money to support that idiot’s drug habit. So I would expect that type of gruntbrain to NOT have too many smarts as to how to get into your laptop if you put obstacles in the way. Next then any laptop protection techniques are to help alert any unsuspecting buyer that the laptop is actually owned by someone and that the laptop should be returned. Next, if that fails because those other people are also gruntbrain idiots, then encryption and passwords etc. should help to protect your data. If someone still gets in, like if you set up a dummy user-only account where the users has NO administrator privileges and therefore cannot get into any other account areas, the Trackion helps to provide information to help locate the laptop.

Assumptions made here is that people who steal laptops are gruntbrain idiots who are probably barely computer literate if that and who would have problems if confronted with obstacles that prevent them from using the laptop. Other assumptions is that people who unknowingly buy stolen laptops on the street would probably have limited computer skills. I’m talking about what is probably the run-of-the-mill theft opportunity where an unattended laptop is stolen or someone gets mugged and has a laptop stolen from him or her. Thieves in those situations probably just want to steal the laptop and sell it for money. I’m also talking about when laptop owners could be unattentive or forgetful where they can simply forget to keep track of their laptop or they leave their laptop alone for a moment when it only takes a moment for someone else to pick up and run away with your laptop.

If on the other hand if the thieves are actually going after your data, like if you are a CEO or some other important person who keeps super important corporate data on the laptop, then you may have no hope because in that data theft situation they will rip your laptop apart to get to the harddrive and then you are the idiot who did not follow any corporate policies for protecting the laptop and avoiding this type of situation.

Of course, you want to protect your data and you don’t want to have your laptop stolen and if it is stolen then you want to put in laptop protection methods by either buying good complete packaged software like CyberAngel -OR- by buying certain other cheaper software like Trackion and using other free software and other free services to implement multiple security methods for your laptop. Your laptop is your baby and of course you want to protect it as much as you can.

Nice article Josh, the CEO of the company that makes LoJack for Laptops just posted a blog entry about keeping laptops safe.
http://www.notebooks.com/?p=548

Users/companies should also consider services that will delete sensative data from notebooks in case they’re stolen.

You can buy a laptop case from http://www.pacsafe.com that has built-in anti-theft features. Check out the MetroSafe 300 or the CourierSafe.