October 18, 2010 by Vincent

Track & Control Stolen Laptop Remotely

Your laptop? $1000. The data in it? Priceless. Even the most casual users will have sensitive data in their laptop to some extend, say, all the passwords you saved in your browser without a master password.

Simply imagine the laptop you are using now falling onto someone’s hand, being ransacked at will. Creepy isn’t it?

Enter Prey, a free tool to track your stolen laptop.

Prey is a small utility with minimal footprints that sits on your computer silently. You won’t be able to find any icons or launchers of Prey after installing, as to make sure the prey is unaware that he’s being watched.

Instead, all options are controlled via the web based panel. You can select some or all of these information to be gathered in your missing device’s report.

• Location (via GPS or WiFi triangulation)
• Hardware and network status
• Webcam image of the thieve
• Screenshot
• Running programs and modified files
• Lock down your PC
• etc…

Lifehacker‘s demo video basically summarized everything:

Prey works on Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, Linux and Android. You can track up to 3 devices and store up to 10 reports on a free account, which suffice for personal use.

#laptop#notebook#prey#tracking