Protect your vital Computer Equipment!

Why should I care?

There’s no worse feeling in the world: You come to open the business at 9am and there's been a break in. There's a mess and you can see a gap where the computer was. The feeling of your stomach dropping and thought of the financial loss glazes in comparison to all the customer and sales data that had been stored on your laptop.

In a world dominated by mobile technology, it is hardly surprising that 90% of business use laptops to store sensitive information. It’s so important to protect your laptop from being stolen and there is a wealth of free programs to help you do just that.

Thieves will be looking to capitalize on new laptops bought as Christmas presents. It is very important to make sure everything’s locked, but sometimes that isn’t enough. Installing a program that could report back where your stolen laptop is and what programs its running could be vital clue between it being recovered or not.

In the UK, a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds and only 3% are ever recovered without tracking software. Make sure you’re protected with the award-winning (and FREE!) anti-theft software called Prey. It’s free to set up an account and you simply download it, install it and leave it.

What can I do?

Every twenty minutes, the Prey program will check with the Prey Website to see whether it’s marked as stolen. If it isn’t ‘missing’, then it will go to sleep until the next check-up. If you log into the website and mark the device as stolen, when your laptop next connects to the internet it will start to silently gather data, such as websites visited, its physical location and if the laptop has a built-in camera it’ll attempt to take a snap of the bandit.

To physically protect your laptop, you can buy a Kensington Lock. This is similar to a bike lock and you simply wrap it around a table leg or immovable object and lock in into the hole marked with a K on the laptop (usually on the side)

You can download Prey from: www.preyproject.com