Within seconds from that person opening the laptop around a WiFi signal, a data packet is sent through to the company website, courtesy of the program you've installed previously. You then contact the company through a designated web-page from an internet café or friend house, input your username, password, and declare the computer stolen. A thief makes the grab, and takes off with all your work and personal life inside your computer. The idea is fairly simple: You install the software, which runs in the background silently, waiting like a vulture for it's prey. Most anti-theft software solutions are trackers Using the GPS or WiFi connection on your computer to pinpoint the location of your hardware using tools like Google Maps, and the results can be extremely useful to police services during their investigations. Security companies have started offering pre-theft solutions to combat the growing trend in computer theft. “But how many exactly in the last year would be difficult to say.” “Laptops are very common to be taken during break-ins to vehicles and homes,” said the chief of Nicoya's OIJ, Luis Eduardo Jimenez Ruiz. "I would really like to see existing commercial services provide high levels of privacy.Proper preparations prevent poor performance, and keeping tabs on your coveted PC or Mac laptop, and the information inside it, should be at the top of the list of preparations whether here in Costa Rica or abroad.īreak-ins and general larceny are among the most common of crimes in Costa Rica, and laptops are an especially coveted item to pilfer from unsuspecting travellers and unwary residents. "I believe that privacy for laptop tracking systems is important," he said. The University of Washington's Kohno said he'd be happy if some of the existing vendors started using the code. Later this month, the Adeona team will give a technical presentation at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Jose, California. The researchers say they're hoping that software developers will build all kinds of new features such as GPS- (Global Positioning System) aware tracking systems for new platforms such as the iPhone. Another service, Brigadoon's PC PhoneHome goes for a one-time $30 fee.īecause Adeona ships with an open-source license, anyone can take the code and improve it or even sell it. For example their software is much harder to remove from the laptop, and these companies are already in the business of working with police to recover stolen laptops. On the other hand commercial products such as Absolute Software's Lojack for Laptops have many features that Adeona lacks. "It's not exactly clear what they're doing since their systems are closed source," said Thomas Ristenpart, a graduate student with the University of California's Department of Computer Science, who worked on the project. The researchers believe that commercial tracking services are unappealing because the services could theoretically be used to keep tabs on legitimate users. It was a privacy problem: How could they build a laptop tracking service that was so private that even the people running the service could not discover the location of the laptop? That information would be accessible only to the user, Kohno said. When the team first started work on Adeona it wasn't the tracking and retrieval of missing laptops that piqued their curiosity. "Without this, you could pretty much kiss the laptop good-bye," he added. "Not all the information that you're going to get in every circumstance is going to find the laptop or catch the bad guy," he said. "Once you actually recover information about your laptop.you probably want to take this information to the police."Īviel Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who is familiar with the Adeona project says he wants to download the code when Adeona goes live. Armed with that information, law enforcement could track down the criminal, said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. The Mac version of Adeona even uses a freeware program called isightcapture to take a snapshot of whomever is using the computer.Īdeona doesn't exactly give you the address and phone number of the person who's stolen your laptop, but it does provide the IP (Internet Protocol) address that it last used as well as data on what nearby routers it used to connect to the Internet. If the laptop ever goes missing, the user downloads another program, enters a username and password, and then picks up this information from the servers, specifically a free storage service that has been around for several years, called OpenDHT. That software then starts anonymously sending encrypted notes about the computer's whereabouts to servers on the Internet. Here's how it works: A user downloads the free client software onto a laptop.
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