Laptop Lojack
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Alas a blackberry can be erased in seconds.
A HD cannot.
My blackberry doesn't even need a remote kill command. 5 unsuccessful password attempts will wipe it.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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That's good for you. What about the VP that mistypes because he's in a hurry and is sure he can't make a mistake? 5 attempts and a wipe would probably lead to that being changed to 10 attempts
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Unfortunately, if a thief is sophisticated enough to know about removing the hard drive and brute forcing encryption, then there is a good chance that they will also understand what a Faraday cage is. So all they would have to do is immediately put the notebook into a pouch that has wire mesh built into it. Then only open the pouch once inside a larger Faraday cage and remove the drive. Even if the drive itself had the kill switch, then they would probably just hack it inside the cage.
I guess you could put some sort of sensor that could be used to tell if the drive is removed, then the drive could have the ability to do something like lock the spindle or delete the file tables using the power from a small built-in battery. To remove the drive legitimately, you could just enter a code before removing it. However, again that could all be bypassed by an extremely sophisticated thief.
In fact, if the notebook gets too difficult to hack, then the thief might start going after the backup device, like a USB drive. Most road warriors use either a DVD-R or USB hard drive for their backups and many times they carry the backups with them. Therefore, if the thief grabbed the computer bag and walked away, he would have not only the original, but also the backups. I know that backups can be encrypted, but if the thief could hack the drive encryption, then who is to say that there is better encryption used for the backups.
Oh well, I guess any defense can be penetrated, but the goal is to make it hard enough to penetrate that you are protected from the vast majority of issues.
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hmmm....
I guess trying to phone for a taxi from the bar might cause problems
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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I would like to take some issue to the original posting, also published elsewhere on the web. It seems to imply that laptop lojack has a data removal option. This is NOT the case according to their web site or the originator of the softerware, CompuTrace. Computrace does have products that will remove data from the hard drive, but they only offer it to corporations large enough to buy their minimum of licenses. If you only have 1 or 2 laptops, they force you to go to Lojack and that product is for attempted retrieval only. Personally, I am in a position where I am far more concerned about the data than the laptop itself and the Lojack product does not give me the comfort that a data removal feature would, the feature that CompuTrace removed from the product offered through lojack.
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