LAUSD Uses Secret Weapon in Laptop Theft Recovery

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In the case of the October theft at LAUSD, the investigation led to the residence of a woman who was found in possession of one of the stolen computers. She confessed to police that her boyfriend had given it to her. That resulted in a sting operation, in which the Los Angeles Police Department recovered an additional 12 laptops. Upon making bail, the boyfriend led police to an additional 11 computers, as well as a school projector, microscope, and entomology kit. Three suspects were arrested, and the investigation continues.

When a computer theft is solved, frequently, so are other cases. As Hawks pointed out, "Usually, the bad guy is doing a lot of other crimes besides just stealing a laptop."

By virtue of the technology being embedded in the BIOS of the computer, local persistence remains, explained Hawks. A thief can "reimage the machine; they can rip out the hard drive. But the agent can heal itself on any hard drive that's put in there." If the hard drive from the stolen computer is placed into a different notebook, "then we have two computers calling into the center," he said.

Eventually, Hawks predicted, computers will include some form of GPS technology that will aide in equipment recovery. Absolute's software already encompasses the capability of working with computers that provide GPS capabilities, such as those that include the Qualcomm Gobi chipset. "With these 3G chips being embedded on the motherboard, it allows us to wake up the PC and track that machine using GPS triangulation," he said. But first, he added, "It has to become pervasive, like WiFi is now."

Embedded into the BIOS, Embedded into the Deal
LAUSD has been using Computrace since 2002. Just a year earlier the district had received a sizable federal grant to put laptops into a large number of classrooms. "At that point we were dealing with 88 classrooms, 20 laptops per classroom, about 1,600 to 1,700 laptops," said Oliver. "We knew that laptops were--for better or worse--going to be targeted by a number of people who didn't necessarily have the best of intentions. We also knew there were a few pieces of technology that would help us to track and make better use of our technology dollars in getting some type of asset tracking."

The district wrote the use of tracking technology into the request for proposal that vendors had to include as part of their package to win the bid. The Absolute solution was suggested by the vendors. "There was nothing tricky about deploying [Computrace]," said Oliver. "The laptops arrived with the software embedded."

Now, he said, when a school or other entity purchases a computer, it comes with the software loaded.

The same agent can be used not only for theft recovery, but also for asset tracking and remote deletion. Absolute's Hawks said that some districts have misplaced computers and used the technology to track them down. If a computer can't be recovered quickly, the remote deletion function allows for all selected data on the machine to be deleted the next time contact is made with the data center. IT administrators can access those profiles from a browser to view assets and generate reports. Continued...