How To : Remotely Track Your Stolen Laptop?

Laptops are among the most commonly used gadgets these days. Laptops are commonly used to store all kinds of information – right from multimedia to personal and confidential information like passwords, credit card information and more. A stolen laptop can really be a disaster! So, what are the possible ways to track a laptop, when stolen?

There are many ways to track a stolen laptop. Some cost you whereas, some are free. Some of the effective software for this purpose are – LAlarm, Prey and Adeona.

Prey and Adeona are free, lightweight applications that track the location of a stolen laptop. Prey is a lightweight application that runs in the background and uses WiFi to track the location of the stolen laptop.

Prey sends you information about your laptop, like -  it’s the programs being run, active network connections, a screenshot of the desktop to your ‘Prey Control Panel’, or directly to your mail inbox. Which can be quite handy to keep track of your laptop remotely, when stolen.

If your laptop has an integrated web cam, you can also get the picture of the thief.

Here are some of the key features of Prey :

• Gives you detailed information of the laptop like it’s whereabouts, active connections, programs executed, desktop screenshot.
• Powerful and light, runs in the background.
• Captures the picture of the thief. (On laptops with integrated webcam)
• Warn the thief by sending a message that appears on the laptop screen.
• Uses WiFi hotspots to find the location of the laptop.
• If there is no active internet connection to send information, Prey connects to the nearest WiFi hotspot to send the information.
• Prey sends information to your Prey Control Panel or directly reports to your mailbox.

You might want to read more about Prey Project.

Unlike Prey, Adeona stores the location updates on an Open source OpenDHT.

Adeona continuously monitors the location of the laptop and stores it within OpenDHT using strong cryptographic mechanisms ensuring complete security of the stored data.

Overview of Adeona:

• Uses Open Source OpenDHT to store location updates.
• Tracks the laptop location using information like IP Address and local network topology.
• None other than the owner of the laptop can use Adeona to track the location of the stolen laptop.

Adeona also sports a handy feature of capturing pictures of the thief using the integrated webcam, but this feature is available only for Mac OS X users.

Find out more about Adeona.

Unlike Prey and Adeona, which track the location of the stolen laptop, LAlarm comes as a complete laptop security utility. It’s a free security software that sounds an alarm when your laptop is in danger of being stolen. LAlarm triggers an alarm when the laptop is disconnected from the power outlet or removed from the table and can destroy all your sensitive data if, the laptop gets stolen. You can also get an SMS alert when an alarm goes off.

Some of the key features of LAlarm are:

• LAlarm triggers an alarm when your laptop is in danger of being stolen.
• Alerts you if your laptop goes outside a described perimeter and also if the laptop is left unattended for a long time
• Destroys all sensitive data in case of theft to ensure that your data doesn’t fall in the wrong hands.
• You can tell your laptop what to do in case your laptop gets stolen.
• SMS alerts when an alarm goes off.

In addition to theft safety, you also get alerts on your laptop’s health like alarm when the battery is under stress, low battery, disk repair alarm and much more.

Check out Lalarm for more information.

As a summary, Prey and Adeona are prolific software that track the location of your stolen laptop. But, one of the drawbacks of Adeona is that – it requires an active internet connection, whereas Prey can use the nearest WiFi hotspot to send you information about your stolen laptop. Unlike the former two, LAlarm, security software, helps in preventing the stealth of your laptop by triggering alarms.