I was speaking with Clain Anderson, Director of Wireless and Security for Lenovo International today about the Computrace service (LoJack for Laptops) and what Lenovo has done with the client software, from Absolute Software. Lenovo embeds the entire Computrace Personal program into the bios of some of its ThinkPad laptops.
The weakness [of Computrace] was that if you erased the hard drive you erased Computrace. We put the whole program into the machine," he says. In that way even if someone erases or swaps out the disk drive the computer will still report in once conneted to the Internet. It then reports the source IP address or phone number. Absolute Software can then use the IP address to track down the unit as well as send a command to erase the disk drive. "It is possible to spoof an IP address and its possible that it won’t be found," he says.
But he points out that Computrace will give customers up to $1,000 back if they can’t recover the unit. Sounds a bit like the Kryptonite Lock guarantee.