SyNET nTracker The Laptop Anti-Theft Solution Joseph Moran
If you travel frequently with a notebook, you know how valuable that piece of equipment can be — not just because of the significant amount of money spent to purchase it, but even more so due to the important – and often even sensitive or confidential – information it contains.
While thieves perfected the art of swiping notebooks from airport security checkpoints long before September 11th, 2001, the increased screening of airline passengers and their belongings only increases the likelihood of being separated from your notebook during an often chaotic security check-in. ("Sir, could you please step over here and take off your shoes?")
With security being what it is today, a utility like SyNet nTracker holds significant promise. The company quotes an FBI statistic that hundreds of thousands of laptops were stolen last year, and only 2% of them are expected to be recovered. That's certainly not encouraging.
nTracker purports to safeguard your notebook and its data by allowing you to surreptitiously track your hardware via the Internet should it be lost or stolen. The software also encrypts folders that you specify in order to protect them from prying eyes.
Unfortunately, the promise of nTracker is likely to remain unfulfilled in many respects.
Installation Seems Easy Enough...
The installation of the nTracker software seems straightforward enough early on. Configuring the settings for one of the three protection parameters, however, is perplexing to say the least.
The first parameter, called Automatic Protection Execution, offers three combinations of number of reboots and number of days before protection is activated. We left the default setting enabled — 5 reboots and 7 days. However, there was no explanation provided in either the application or the documentation regarding exactly what this meant or how protection would be enabled after the requisite number of reboots and elapsed period of time.
The other two parameters are more clear-cut — one is a graphic that is supposed to accost an unauthorized user with a range of warning messages ranging from polite to stern, while the other is 128-bit folder encryption that engages when a machine is locked out. You can specify up to three folders to be protected.
nTracker does a good job of keeping its presence on the computer sub rosa. It doesn't show up in the program listings, it's similarly absent from Add/Remove Programs, and we couldn't identify an obvious candidate for the program while examining a list of running processes in Windows Task Manager.
(Of course, even an invisible Windows program can be circumvented by booting from a floppy or CD, so SyNet recommends that prior to installation the system BIOS be configured to prevent booting from anything other than the hard drive, and that a supervisory password be set to preclude that setting from being changed.)
