Absolute recently received a theft report concerning a laptop that a salesman claimed had been 'stolen from his vehicle.'  Soon after the 'crime' the computer logged onto the Internet and began checking in with our monitoring center.  This allowed our theft recovery team to extract information on the computer’s unauthorized user and location.  Guess where the computer turned up?  It was still in the hands of the user who claimed it was stolen!  He had falsely filed a theft report so he could keep the computer for himself.

You can read more of the story here:

http://blog.absolute.com/absolute-recovers-laptop-from-clever-thief/

This scenario brings up an interesting issue for those deploying laptops equipped with Intel's AT-p anti-theft technology.  Do you tell your users it's deployed?  Or keep its existence as much of a secret as you can?

In this example, informing this user that AT-p was deployed would likely have prevented the 'theft' of this laptop.  The salesman, realizing his laptop would have been rendered useless by means of a poison pill or a timer rundown, probably wouldn't have 'stolen' it in the first place.

However, the 'theft' resulted in the removal of a bad apple from this company - The one silver lining in this unfortunate incident.

So the question is this: When you deploy AT-p in your company, will you tell your employees it's there?

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Please note that any indictments and criminal complaints referenced in this post are merely unproven accusations, and the accused, in all cases, are innocent until proven guilty.

People often say to me - "I've got encryption, so I'm protected," or "I always use a laptop lock," so I'm protected.

In response I always remind them that laptop security should be looked at like a three-legged stool.  If any of the three legs are missing, the stool falls over (unless the person on the stool is a member of the Beijing Circus, but that's a rare exception).

What are the three legs?

The first leg is Physical Security, like a laptop lock and/or an alarm on your laptop bag.  If you're leaving your machine, lock it down!

The second leg is Data Protection like encryption.  If your machine does get out of your control and someone nefarious removes your hard drive, you can be "reasonably" confident they won't get at your data.  (I say "reasonably" because we've all seen the laptops at airports on in presentations where the password is written on a sticky note stuck to the machine!)

The third and final leg on the stool is a Protection Solution like AT-p.  If your machine fails to check in to the monitoring center after a certain length of time then presto it bricks.  Or if you know your machine is lost you can send it a poison pill and lock it down.

How many legs does your stool have?