Nowadays, technology and gadgets are a part of our daily lives in school, work or at home and it’s common for people to have expensive gadgets or tech toys. Media devices like USB flash drives, digital cameras and mp3 players like the popular iPod are the common ones. Not only do they attract attention from your friends or colleagues but these gadgets are hot items for burglars and thieves. Once they get stolen there’s little to no chance of you getting it back.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your stolen device could phone home? Let you know where it is so you could recover it? Now you can with the help of the GadgetTrak system.
All you have to do is register your device and install the agent files into the root of your device. If your device gets stolen, all you have to do is login to the user interface and flag the device as either lost or stolen. The next time the device gets accessed it will attempt to contact the Gadget Theft server and provide you with critical information like public IP Address & internal network IP address, location (includes country, state, city and zip code, as well as area code), username, computer name and IP whois and host name.
How does it work?
The patent-pending GadgetTrakâ„¢ system enables USB device owners to track missing or stolen devices. The agent files are installed in the root of a USB mass storage devices, such as a USB flash drive, digital camera and iPods. When the device is plugged into a system running Windows XP a prompt may appear telling the user to “install a USB driver”. This is actually a social engineering trick, no USB drivers are really required. When this prompt appears you can simple click on “cancel” or “OK” nothing will happen until the device is reported stolen.
When “OK” is clicked the agent software communicates with the Gadget Theft server. If the server reports back that the device has been stolen then forensic information is collected from the system. The data is sent to the server, the data is logged and an email is sent to you with the information that was able to be collected.
This is not the only trigger for the agent to communicate with the server. When the device is accessed from “My Computer” and the drive is double clicked this will also trigger the agent to communicate with the server.
There are some limitations to the Gadget Trak system. If the device is simply plugged into a computer, the agent can’t run. It needs some user action to trigger it like the initial prompt that appears after a USB device is plugged. Another way is if the user double clicks on the MyComputer drive.
I’m sure you’d be happy to know that this service is totally FREE! Yup, registration is 100% free of charge. This service is still in it’s Beta phase but for a minimum fee, you can upgrade to a Pro account which gives you additional features like better location accuracy, active connection analysis and reports, firewall workarounds, custom agent feature selector, GadgetTrak labels/stickers that you can put on your device to assist recovery and many more.
Learn more about Gadget Trak Recovery System
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March 2nd, 2007 at 8:41 am
@dimaks – When I first read about this, I thought to myself, if thieves know about this, I’m sure they’ll find a way of getting around it or deleting the agent files just like they did in the case that you mentioned.
But anyways, it’s better to have this than nothing at all. Atleast you have a better chance of recovering any stolen devices.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:51 am
Awesome technology! a must have i guess. And if i may relate, here in Japan, for sometime – i heard they put gps systems on the bicycles and when stolen or lost, it can be tracked down easily. But I also heard they stopped producing such bicycle units after the public (or perhaps the potential thieves) knew that there are gps systems in them and remove them before taking the bike away.