Safeguard Your Laptop Data From Being Stolen
Posted on January 10, 2012
Gone are the days when laptops were meant for experts and people who could afford an expensive carry along computer. Laptops have become so common, and you will find that practically every office going person is carrying a laptop, more because of the ease of use and the fact that they can carry work to and from the office.
They have become so common, that very often people are careless and leave their laptops lying here and there in cafeterias, libraries and other places where there is every chance that it can be stolen. As you can well imagine, the laptop is something that a person can walk away with without being suspected that he is stealing it. In addition a house break can also be the cause of your laptop getting carried off.
People have such important information saved in their laptops that rather than the laptop being stolen, it’s the information therein that is far more important and vital. Therefore there should be ways to protect the laptop.
There are ways to strengthen the log-in password and methods by which you can safeguard the responsive services that can be got at using your web browser. However the fact is that when the mechanism is with someone who is unfamiliar, one has to think of better ways to protect the laptop.
One technique is encryption from lone files to the encryption of the complete drive. In this way you can absolutely block data such that even experts in the police department will not be able to get at it.
Another means of protecting laptops is to utilize third-party software that can be accessed remotely. There is one such open source safeguarding software that can be used to protect laptops called the Prey that can be installed after it is downloaded from the website preyproject.com.
If your laptop is missing and you have Prey installed all you would have to do is to report the missing theft with Prey systems and the moment the thief logs on to the Internet through your laptop you will be notified. The software will enable you to watch the thief surf the web, take pictures of whatever he is doing and if he logs on to any social networking site you will also be able to get all his personal details like his name, school, age, IP address, address of his ISP, and even pictures of the thief . all this can be forwarded to the police who will have no difficulty getting their hands on him and returning your laptop to you.
The only problem with these types of applications is if the thief would be able to get on to the system intact r otherwise. It would be a great idea to keep a guest account on, so as to ensure that the application would be in a position to track the perpetrator when he accesses the Internet using that account. This application called Prey can even cover desktops as well as mobile phones.
There is one other well used application known as logmein.com that can be utilized for Macs and PCs and this is a solution that offers the fundamental facility free of cost. This application concentrates more on facilitating the log-in of remote accessibility, instead of trying to get back your device that has been lost or stolen. This application also has a furtive mode which implies that if someone is utilizing your device, you have the option of logging in without his knowledge and taking pictures of them browsing the Inter
