As a result, criminals often lead the cops to their own door. Thieves will try a Google search like where to sell a stolen laptop, Jay Street, Newark NJ. Or they'll post a Facebook update: Travis is enjoying his new computer. "We get subscriber records through the IP address, and then run them through popular sites," Perez says. "Facebook, WhitePages.com, Hi5, and Google, for instance. We often get a photo." Perez's partner, Marty Davin, assures the room that these leads are passed on: "We want to make sure the investigator has as much information as possible so that when he arrives on the scene, he's prepared."
Perez uses full-on cop speak to highlight the low-fuss benefits Absolute can offer. "We try to minimize the time you allocate to laptop theft," he says. "If you got a homicide but are also tracking a laptop, you can call us and ask, 'Hey, you got a guy in Newark?' We'll email or fax you the data, and your warrant support forms, ready to go for the prosecutor's office." The room nods. This is like Christmas.
As the seminar ends, Detective Larry Collins, a 13-year veteran, pulls the officers aside to tell them about a laptop case he's working on. A few days later, Collins gets a call from Perez. "He said, 'That laptop you mentioned came back online, and this is where it's being used,' " Collins says. "We went right over to the address Absolute gave us, and recovered the laptop. The owner had just bought it and had no idea it was stolen. It took 20 minutes. I wish every investigation were that easy."
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Recent Comments | 13 Total
October 20, 2008 at 11:33pm by Ken Westin
Another solution is GadgetTrak ( www.gadgettrak.com ) which not only protects your laptop but does it in a privacy safe fasion. In addition GadgetTrak provides software for mobile phones and other portable media devices.
October 27, 2008 at 5:53pm by Pete Steege
Caution: the 'wipe' to your hard drive is good for amateur thiefs, but won't prevent serious hackers or espionage from retrieving your data. Self-encrypting hard drives is a solution from Dell, HP and Lenovo on their secure PCs.
November 5, 2008 at 9:15pm by John Klassen
Enterprise and Government customers may be interested to learn that Absolute Software is a member of McAfee's Security Innovation Alliance (www.mcafee.com/sia). Absolute is integrating Computrace with McAfee's Security Management system called ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO).
McAfee's Cybercrime initiative also benefits from Asolute's partnership with law enforcement because in many parts of the world, possession in 9/10th's of the law! (www.mcafee.com/us/about/corporate/fight_cybercrime)
Further thwarting bad guys is Computrace embedded BIOS support, which allows the Computrace agent to survive operating system re-installations, hard drive reformats and even hard drive replacements. A list of Manufacturers, Makes, and Models is at http://www.absolute.com/products-bios-enabled-computers.asp
January 3, 2009 at 9:20am by Tadhg Pearson
"laptop is stolen every 53 seconds. More than 12,000 laptops disappear weekly from U.S. airports alone."
Where do you get this statistic from? I can't see this in the CSI survey...