First there was LoJack for your car, a hidden radio signal that told police where the car was, making it impossible for thieves to evade capture. Then came LoJack-like features for PCs. Now there’s GadgetTrak, which makes a LoJack-like theft recovery product for PCs and digital devices like cameras. With laptop loss and theft so prevalent, the firm has decided to make an enterprise push. eSecurity Planet finds out more.
The anti-theft software company GadgetTrak, Inc., founded in 2007, provides theft recovery and data protection solutions for everything from MP3 players to thermal imaging cameras. While the company was founded with a focus on the consumer market, it’s now targeting the enterprise – the enterprise offering is heading into beta soon, with plans to launch within the next six months.
Company founder Ken Westin says he got the idea for the solution while working for a security company, writing Trojans and viruses for USB devices to demonstrate why they would need security solutions to keep such devices from accessing the network. “While I was doing that, I was working on a way to make the technology more white hat – and that’s how I found a way to allow it to track devices,” he says.
The first version of the software was designed to be installed on a digital camera or other portable media device. “When you plug that into a PC to access it, it’ll actually hijack the computer it’s connected to, get its Internet connection, and send information out regarding its location, name of the person logged in, that sort of thing,” Westin says.
Westin launched the product for free and quickly attracted attention. “Then we did a premium version and we started actually charging people for it – and it took off from there,” he says. “We started looking at how to protect other types of devices… mobile phones were a key target, as well as laptops.”
