Thursday 10 November 2011

Small victory against Laptop Crime

Recently (and sadly all too often) I received a call from a client letting me know they'd had a burglary and their laptop had been stolen. In all cases up until this event this is the last we ever hear of our stolen laptop and our precious data.

This time things were different. I use remote access software http://www.logmein.com/ with 99% of my clients which helps me to be agile and respond in a timely fashion and this "missing" kept appearing online over the next few weeks, well today I was able to access the laptop, look up its default gateway, login to its local router and find the ISP login inforamtion which detailed the landline connection the ADSL Connection was making.

Needless to say Thames Valley Police were very pleased to receive this information and my client will be shortly receiving their laptop back.

With Laptop theft a real problem these days this was a lucky break in that the laptop had not been wiped, which would have not given me the opportunity to access the machine and find out the user and location information.

I always recommend clients to keep their laptop safe and secure never to leave it in the car and always to keep the data backed up.
There are some great software packages, my personal favourite is SafeSync from http://www.trendmicro.co.uk/ , it allows you to backup and share data between multiple machines and the cloud, also you can access the files from any mobile device or tablet direct from the cloud storage.
Stuart Sharp

stuart.sharp@sme-uk.com
SME-UK Ltd
+44 871 288 3540