Dont Get Your Laptop Stolen!

by c.J
published by Rinie 5th September 2009


Laptops are more widespread today than they have ever been. Everywhere you look, there are notebooks of every kind. Tiny ones, monster laptops, and everything in between. With such an explosion in notebook use, there are that many more targets for thieves looking to pawn our stuff for a quick buck, or even worse, steal our data for more despicable uses.

What a thief can do is to make use of your laptop's login credentials to taunt you right from your own virtual identities. My friend house was broken a couple of months ago and her laptop and iPhone stolen; the very same day, her Facebook account was being hijacked, who then posted status updates to mock her about the stolen wares. This is a creepy reminder that once your laptop is stolen, in most cases, a burglar can access almost anything on it—that is, unless you take the right precautions with the extremely mobile window into your life.




Don't count on laptop recovery

Let’s face the fact that banking on laptop recovery software as a replacement for simply taking precautions to protect the data is like planning to hit the jackpot in the casino. Don't get us wrong—it's pretty cool in concept, but it's unlikely to succeed in the event of laptop theft. Success stories exist, but they are few and far between.

Either both the Mac and PC, there are numerous ways for a thief to get around the monitoring and reporting performed by most recovery software while still having full privilege access to your data. Scary huh? That person could turn off the network connection so the software never reports its location, or he could remove the hard drive while pawning off the rest of the machine.

If you understand that recovery is unlikely, but want to try the software anyway as an extra precaution, Undercover for the Mac tends to be a popular choice. The company behind it recently added WiFi-based positioning info (supplied by Skyhook Wireless) to provide law enforcement with a map of where a laptop may be located. There's also MacTrak software, which added Skyhook's WiFi positioning last November and transmits images and network info via e-mail or to a Flickr account.
For Windows, a number of users recommend LoJack for Laptops. The software reports its location via network connection on a daily basis (if stolen, the company can bump that up to every 15 minutes), and users can choose to remotely wipe data if they decide to give up on the hunt.

Lock down those user accounts

In the event that the heavens don't open and return your laptop to you, very slim chances. Your first line of defence is to make sure that all of the user accounts on your laptop are password-protected (preferably with strong/ complicated passwords). Macs and Windows machines can all do this, but many users set it to automatically log into an account upon start-up, which reduces the level of protection you have.

Under Mac OS X, simply go to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Security. You'll definitely want to check "Disable automatic login," and "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" is helpful as well if you're in the habit of closing your machine to take it with you without shutting it down. You may also choose to require a password to unlock each pane in the System Prefs, and log out after a certain period of inactivity.



Under Windows, it can be done by heading into the Control Panel and going into User Accounts. From here, you can "Change the way users log on or off." You can either choose to use the Welcome screen or, for more security, uncheck this option so that users must enter both a username and password when they log in. You can also set the screensaver to ask for a password by going into the Display applet and clicking over to the Screen Saver tab.