How to Recover Your Stolen Laptop With Ease

Hey everyone – I’ve found something completely awesome thanks to Gizmodo.com and it is called Prey. Have you ever had a laptop or desktop computer stolen? Have you ever wanted it back? Well, with Prey, it’s not only possible, but extremely likely that you will recover your lost goods. Think of all the important junk you store on your laptop – financial records, passwords, school work, work work, and that video of you singing in the bathroom to the Backstreet Boys that you never wanted anyone to see (but never wanted to delete either). When it comes down to it, your laptop has some pretty important junk on it – maybe not very important to others, but to you – priceless.

Prey is a program that installs on your Mac, PC, Linux, Ubuntu and there’s a few others that I don’t know about. It works on either laptops or desktops and runs in the background, unknown to the user. After you install the program, you’ll never know it’s there until you need to use it. If you ever need to remove the program, you can simply re-download the installer, and choose the option to uninstall. Prey allows you, once you know your laptop is stolen, to activate its service via their online dashboard. Once Prey is activated, you need only to allow it some time to begin working it’s magic – 20 minutes is the maximum time between reports that are generated. Prey reports back location data, webcam snapshots, screenshots, etc…  The first thing you should do when you know your laptop is stolen is to notify the police and file a police report. You can then let them know that you have tracking software installed on your computer that will generate location-based data, and also provide images from the camera. This will allow you to make a positive identification of the thief, aid in their capture, and the return of your precious computer.

I recently “reported my laptop stolen” on the Prey dashboard to see how the reports would work. Below are some of the screen shots.

This first shot is an overview of the dashboard. You’ll see that it identifies my device, some of the network information (the wireless network my laptop is currently connected to – including the IP address). It shows how long ago the report was generated. The coolest part? A nice map that shows exactly where my computer is, based off of wifi data. (NOTE: In order to protect my privacy and the location of my home from people who I would rather not know where I live, this map is arbitrary and does not represent my home – if you want to stalk me, please do not go to the area indicated on the map as I don’t live there. I’m pretty sure the people who do live there wouldn’t like it either). In other words – I have cut and pasted a Google Map into this image – but the image is representative of what you would see if you reported your laptop or desktop stolen, only particular to the actual location of your hardware.

The next image is perhaps the most important of them all. It shows a screen shot of what is going on with my desktop. In this particular instance, I was lucky enough to nab a screen shot of the “perpetrator” (me) on his own Facebook page. I know it’s his Facebook page, because the next image clearly shows a webcam screenshot of him from my laptop’s webcam. I can cross reference the image with the name I’ve found on Facebook to positively identify the dirty rotten thief.

Big Brother? Absolutely. The possibilities with this are endless, but I’m just grateful that I can stop a thief in their tracks if they are ever dumb enough to steal my laptop from me. As a side note, if you decide to use Prey, you will need to activate the Guest Account on your laptop or desktop. This will allow the thief to get on the computer without accessing your sensitive data. How are you going to catch them using it if they can’t get on their wireless network, access Facebook, etc..? If you do not allow this, then the computer will not be able to connect to the internet when the thief opens it up and tries to use it. If you don’t have the guest account activated, when the thief tries to use your computer, Prey will still try to connect to an unprotected wireless network, but we all know those are few and far between these days.

How much does it cost? Prey is free from www.preyproject.com. If you are a privacy freak, they have made their software open-source so you can see the code for yourself and make sure they aren’t sending any Big Brother data back to their servers. They have a paid service as well that provides on-demand reports, or you can settle for a report every 20 minutes for free.

If you need help or would like more information, let me know, and I’d be glad to help you out.