Identity Theft Protection Lock

Safeware Insurance says that over 600,000 laptops were stolen in 2004 and the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that 97% of stolen computers are never recovered. The Gartner Group estimates that you have a 1 in 10 chance of having your laptop stolen. Many of these computers are stolen at airports, the business place and at college/university. If your laptop is stolen now, not only can it be traced and it’s location be given to the Police, but all your sensitive data can be erased from a remote monitoring center.

Absolute Software Corporation is the current leader in computer theft recovery, data protection and secure asset tracking solutions and currently have over 2 million subscriptions under contract. They have offices in the United States at Bellevue, Washington, in Canada at Vancouver, British Columbia and in the United Kingdom. Absolute offers four commercial “Computrace Core Technology” products to corporate, health care, government and education sectors and one other product for the business traveller, small business owner, student, homeowner and average citizen who owns a laptop computer, and that product is “Computrace LoJack for Laptops”

Allow us to give you a brief explanation of the technology and how it works; Absolute Software’s prize invention is referred to as the Computrace Core Technology, and the Computrace agent is a small software client that can be embedded into the BIOS firmware of your laptop at the factory, or installed like most other software applications onto the hard drive. Absolute has achieved this significant arrangement with all the major computer manufacturers such as Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Motion Computing, Panasonic and Toshiba where their Computrace agent is embedded at the factory and their claim is that the Computrace agent can therefore survive system re-installations, hard drive reformats and even hard drive replacements.

You are covered by our $1 Million Total Service Guarantee from the moment you enroll. If in the unfortunate event your identity is misused while you are a LifeLock member, we will pay professionals to resolve the problem for you – up to $1 million!

The ability to withstand these changes is critical in order to survive unauthorized removal attempts. Once installed, the agent simply needs an Internet or phone connection to communicate with the monitoring centre; no user intervention is required. The “always on” agent calls frequently on a scheduled basis over IP and dial-up connections, without needing any action from the laptop user. So if some thief (a lot of laptop theft is the first stage of identity theft) steals your laptop, the hidden agent is always broadcasting it’s location, whether the thief is using a wireless internet connection, cable, dial-up etc.

Once the agent is installed any required updates are completed at the server side and it runs silently and automatically and is virtually impossible for an unauthorized user to accidently or deliberately delete. Because most of the computer manufacturers provide embedded support for Computrace in the BIOS or firmware of the notebook computer even if the Computrace agent gets altered or removed from the hard drive by an unauthorized user, the embedded support module will rebuild the Computrace agent application on the drive (very cool). Absolute calls this rebuilding feature “Persistence” and obviously it is critical to Absolute to be able to recover and return the stolen laptop to the rightful owner.

The Comutrace agent is designed to be removed only by an authorized user with the correct password. To make sure the agent remains invisible to an unauthorized user, Computrace is quite difficult to detect, as it runs a non-descript service, and is not listed as an application and the product does not show up on the programs menu list or as a system tray icon. LoJack for Laptops is backed by a professional theft recovery team that is licensed as a private investigation agency and staffed by former Police officers and security professionals. The recovery team works directly with local law enforcement and Internet Service Providers and uses information sent from the stolen laptop to investigate, get evidence and assist local Police with recovering your computer.

When a laptop is stolen you just need to make one simple phone call and the recovery process begins. It is now estimated that more than 9 million Americans each year are the victim of identity theft and Absolute may be able to combat some of those identity thefts with their LoJack for Laptops Premium. With the premium you not only have the ability to recover your laptop but when you report your computer as stolen, you can activate the added “Data Delete” service. So the next time your laptop calls into the monitoring centre the Data Delete is supposed to erase and overwrite your files. Absolute says that your entire hard drive is erased and overwritten so as to make sure that everything that someone would need to steal your identity cannot be accessed. Does anyone have a story about a stolen laptop with or without Computrace, leave a comment?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Computers and Identity theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.