Can I really use software to find out who stole my laptop?

Faced with a choice between your £1000 MacBook Air and your £1000 antique grandfather clock, most burglars wouldn’t think twice; grandfather clocks don’t slip neatly into a bag, and you can’t do much with them apart from stick them in the corner and watch them tick. But the ability to remotely operate computers via the internet – a subject we featured last month – is giving victims of theft a good chance of finding out who swiped their machine.

When a thief gets your laptop home it’s fairly likely that they’ll connect to the internet with it. And when they do, services such as logmein.com or Apple’s Back To My Mac can immediately tell that the machine is online – and, crucially, let you see exactly what’s happening; you can watch as emails are written, websites are visited, and you can take screengrabs of the lot. When you sense that the stolen computer is sitting idle, you can leap into action; use whatsmyip.com to find out the IP address he’s operating from and, if your laptop has a built-in webcam, just turn it on remotely, giving you a perfect mugshot when they return to the machine.

Two criminals in New York were recently nabbed using exactly this method (see d95.com/laptop1), while reader John S directed us via the Cyberclinic blog to a similar saga which was happily resolved a few days ago (see d95.com/laptop2) – although in the latter case the police needed some persuading before they took the amassed evidence seriously. But this clever trick is catching on; specialist software such as Orbicule for the Mac and Lo-Jack for the PC even does the sleuthing for you, activating as soon as you notifiy the company of the theft and collecting all the screenshots and the IP addresses on your behalf.

Of course, it’s possible that the thief is a technological whizzkid who is wise to all this, and will immediately get under the bonnet of the machine to lock you out. But most will be too tempted to play with their new toy and, in the process, leave a heap of clues that will lead the police right to their door.