Anti-theft device for laptops

[Agent_Steal]

Trio invent anti-theft device for laptops

Sounds pretty promising and I hope to give it a try on my older brothers laptop once it comes out.

[PaLiE]

check out at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobi.../security.mspx

[muert0]

My PDA has finger print recognition built in. ANd the numbers on how many laptops are stolen is kinda sad.
I don't think I'd leave my laptop just sitting around in an airport. But i wouldn't open attachments in emails either...

[the_JinX]

Why not follow Ramzi the l33t hacker and try his laptop theft prevention methode

http://www.thebroken.org/ episode 3

[i2c]

Yea, thing with this is in x number of years so many people will have one of these like car alarms everyone will ignore it when it goes off anyway.

Better ways are definatly biometrics, which is coming more and more available as we speak

i2c

[steve.milner]

Originally posted here by i2c
Yea, thing with this is in x number of years so many people will have one of these like car alarms everyone will ignore it when it goes off anyway.

Better ways are definatly biometrics, which is coming more and more available as we speak

i2c

I'm not sure how biometrics will work.

If it's in software then booting with a cd like knoppix will get round that & the drive can then be re-formatted. Worst case a new hard drive needs to be installed (a lot cheaper than a laptop)

If it's in hardware then flashing the bios should sort the problem out, even if it's not there has to be some mechanism to reset the biometrics in case of problems. (Lost finger/eye etc).

Certainly the biometrics I've had experience of have resulted in many false negatives and require another method of 'getting in'.

Steve

[Info Tech Geek]

Originally posted here by i2c
Yea, thing with this is in x number of years so many people will have one of these like car alarms everyone will ignore it when it goes off anyway.

You are probably right, but I could also see someone pushing it off the counter or table if it gets too annoying.

We had someone throw a cinder block through a car window the other day because the cars alarm goes off twice a night between 12 am and 6 am every single night.

[MrCoffee]

I am not sure, but to me anyways, there is a BIG difference between anti-theft and securing the data AFTER the theft! We have a couple of notebooks here at work, and I have a number of them at home. I use a security cable whenever I am not at home, or in my office at work (which I lock when I leave it).
Personally I have my own notebooks to have a bios password, making it somewhat tough to get to the data if they do happen to get the machine from me, and lots of passwords before/during/after the boot process.
I doubt my users here at work, my wife or my 7 year old use the cables I got them. I watched my wife leave her notebook on a table in an airport, go get something to eat and come back to it when we flew to Florida last year. (I was with the kids, about 45 feet away).
The data is important, but to me, keeping the machine is more important. I cant afford to replace it, and insurance wouldnt cover the loss. The security cable would work in most applications, but in many cases, the notebook is damaged, cause it got yanked out of the thief's hands when he ran out of free cable.
PDA's are a tough one too. I have two sales people that only password enable their PDAs when they are comming inhouse for a meeting, cause they know I will check and get pissed about the no password. They say "it's only my contacts" but between the two of them, they have every single customer, sales amounts, pending and new customers listed on the PDAs.

Nothing new in this post, except the age old question, how to stop the portable from being taken in the first place?

[ric-o]

We're looking at disk encryption software to protect the data on these laptops as this is more valuable than the laptop itself in most cases. Plus, we really dont have the time to chase and realistically dont expect to get the laptops back.

If anyone's interested, we are looking at the following products...

* PC Guardian's Encryption Plus Hard Disk www.pcguardiantechnologies.com/Encryption_Plus_Hard_Disk/index.html
* SecureDoc Disk Encryption Software by WinMagic www.winmagic.com
* CyberAngel www.thecyberangel.com

[i2c]

when I talked about the use of biometrics I meant having the acess of using any drive dis-allowed until its been ok though the BIOS, Yea admittly this wouldnt work with current BIOS becuase there volatile based memory that can be erased by removing the power, I was thinking of something based in hardware that could only be bypassed using hardware based reverse engineering of the chip.

Theres always gonna be another way in, but if these things are locked down so that booting isnt possible until something is biometric data is recieved its going to severly hamper the opportunist thief thats what 80% i reackon of these crimes are.

i2c