LoJacked! App reels in computer thieves
July 1, 2010 by Steve HannafordPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, New Products
Apple’s enhanced app for tracking lost or stolen iPads was the hero in a recent police chase and arrest.
The story, chronicled in the San Jose Mercury News, makes a strong argument for protecting all portable computers with a kind of LoJack theft location system.
The story begins with a daytime burglar alarm, relayed by an alarm company to a software company employee at work. The victim hurried home, saw evidence of the break-in, and noticed that a number of computers were missing including two iPads and a laptop. But unknown to the burglars, the engineer had installed apps on his iPhone that could locate the GPS coordinates of the stolen iPads.
When the police officer showed up, the engineer showed him a map on his iPhone pinpointing the location of the stolen goods as they were being driven to another location in town. The police managed to find the car, arrest the thieves and recover the lost computers (and a number of other machines the burglars had taken from others).
As the news story reported:
“Police spokesman Ronnie Lopez said it was a prime example of how police and the public are using modern technological tools to fight crime. Long used in automobile tracking services such as LoJack, the GPS tracking technology is becoming more common for personal and corporate technological devices such as laptops and phones.”
Apple’s not the only maker of such applications: There are products from Absolute Software and MyLaptopGPS, and we expect that most tablets will have this capacity as well.
Whether for asset security or simple inventory control, this is a technology that can offer a major new tool for IT security. As Fast Company reports:
“A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds. More than 12,000 laptops disappear weekly from U.S. airports alone. Only 3% of stolen laptops are ever returned. According to the Computer Security Institute, the average large company lost almost $3.9 million last year to laptop and mobile-device thefts, and another $4.5 million on the proprietary and confidential data stored in those machines.”
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