CALIFORNIA COMPUTRACE COMPUTER TRACKING SOFTWARE CBS 5: Protecting Your Laptop from Theft: "Protecting Your Laptop from Theft

Feb 7, 2005 7:56 pm US/Pacific
(CBS 5) Laptop computers are now outselling desktops -- they are portable, valuable, and the perfect pick for thieves.
U.C. Santa Cruz student John Draper found that out the hard way.

'I had 2000 to 3000 hours of work on there, and hundreds of essays I've written, dozens of poems, a movie script... everything,' he said.

Without his college thesis, he could not graduate.

Draper is not alone. Everything from company secrets to personal photographs have disappeared in the thousands of laptops snatched by thieves every year. San Francisco Police Detective Richard Leon says eight to ten are reported missing in the city every day.

'They are valuable,' he says. 'And they are so easy to sell. Everybody wants a laptop. People will buy them on the street. People will buy them on eBay. People will buy them anywhere.'

In the past, there was little police could do. But now, there is new technology that can lead detectives right to the person using the stolen computer. It's a software tool called Computrace. Anyone can download it on to their laptop, desktop PC, or Mac. IBM installs it on all new laptop models. Once the user pays an annual subscription fee of about $40, the computer is on a watch list.

IBM security expert Henry Ramos helped us demonstrate how it works. While he wasn't looking, we took his laptop to an unknown location. He alerts Computrace while we used his computer to log on to the Internet through a cafe's wireless access point. Once I established a connection, the laptop sent a message to a monitoring center, revealing the machine's IP address.

That series of numbers is assigned to a specific location by the Internet service provider, so Computraces contacts the ISP with the IP address and tracks down the user -- right to the street address. That's where police step in with a search warrant.

"In most cases, we find a housewife or a student using a laptop they bought in the street and they have no idea it's been stolen," said Leon.

In Draper's case, a neighborhood teen stole his computer. Using the Computrace tracking software, police were able to recover it -- and his thesis -- in time for graduation.