My sony vaio laptop got stolen day before. Needless to say i am very upset. I had an idea. I had installed avast home edition on the laptop. It would have a licence key unique to me. Can that keybe used to identify the IP address of the comp whenever it is updated next time? Everytime i would switch on the computer it would update the virus database. Am sure someone would have a list of IPs whi h are being updated regularly.
Pls. Any help would be appreciated. Besidesbeing a very expensive laptop,i have tons of critical and confidential data there. And i do not have backup for past 6 months.
Were you using OpenDNS? If you weren’t just using OpenDNS, but had an account (free) with them, you could probably login to your OpenDNS account & see the ip addresses your laptop was using.
Maybe they can. We, users, can’t do this trace back.
Three suggestions for the next time:
Use one partition for system/programs, other for your documents and data and another for installers, videos, etc.
Use Truecrypt to encrypt the whole computer or, at least, the partition of your documents/data. You can encrypt a volume file or the whole device (partition). http://www.truecrypt.org/
Use Mozy for online backup of your critical documents/data. Click Mozy in my signature to get 2,2 Gb of free remote backup
Even if you were able to get the IP, that is only the start of the task. You then have to find the ISP linked to that IP, then you have to email them to ask who was assigned that IP at a specific time (this has to be quite accurate), with IPs from your ISP (or perversely theirs) they are usually dynamically assigned and over the course of say a day that IP could have been assigned hundreds of times.
This too would likely be where you got told to sod off, because you would also have to get the ISP to give you the users address and ISPs are somewhat reluctant to release this kind of information without say a police request/warrant, etc.
Personally I doubt the police would be very interested, if they are anything like the UK police, bone idle and for a low value item (I know to you it isn’t low value) even less.
Recently a man’s BMW car was stolen and he found where it was parked, he called the police, they said they were too busy to send anyone, but they said they would send someone to tow it away and for that they would charge him £110. He had wanted them to catch the thief, but effectively that wasn’t going to happen and they were going to add insult to injury and charge him £110. So he had someone bring him the spare and he drove it away, no justice.
I know what you are saying. I have to go through the police anyway. Finding the ISP should not be a problem. It is finding the location of the IP. Am praying the police would be able to help us.
Each network interface card (NIC) has an unique address called media access control (MAC) address. This address can be spoofed by software, but the original address will not be changed and can be used to track down stolen laptops. This must be done by creating a list of stolen laptops MAC-addresses and software checking against this list. I think many end users of stolen laptops doesn’t even know its stolen and will at some point or another deliver it to a computer repair shop or connect to a network with laptop tracking software. This is how we can regain at least more laptops than we do at the moment, which is basically none. You can help out, have a look at http://hitthebutton.org for more information.
If you can’t afford to loose it, then Insurance should be considered as part of the initial
investment required when purchasing any new equipment. Safeware Insurance is one place that offers such protection. (USA)
