Johannesburg, 01 Feb 2006
After NetTrace made an IP trace through the Internet to a prominent university residence campus in Johannesburg, inspectors from South African Police - Serious Violent Crimes Division swiftly recovered a high-end laptop that had been stolen two weeks earlier, during an armed robbery at the Makro head office.
Two individuals were arrested, the end buyer and a middleman. This has given the police a very strong link directly to the gang that committed the armed robbery.
The PC tracking service is called NetTrace Loss Control and is based on a product from Absolute Software, a Canadian listed company. At regular intervals, the computer relays its location to a main monitoring server. The stolen Makro laptop gave its location as soon as it was connected to the Internet. That gave police enough information to obtain search warrants for release of information from the university`s service provider and this led to the exact room number where the hardware was located.
"Many people have been sceptical as to the possibility of tracing a computer through the World Wide Web using only IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. In this case we had very good response times from the police due to the seriousness of the crime, and could get the correct warrants issued quickly. We were able to provide the police with a critically useful lead in this case. I am very happy when NetTrace can add extra value such as this to our customers and to help reduce violent crime in South Africa," says Jonathan Bass, MD of NetTrace.
"It was also very interesting how we could actually wait for the perpetrator to return to their room between classes, before we executed the search operation at the exact moment when we knew they were using the computer," says Bass.
A spokesperson from Makro said: "Although we are using NetTrace to help manage our leased computer assets, we were very happy that they could add extra value in our investigation around this theft case."
NetTrace Loss Control is designed to cut down on computer loss and crime committed internally and externally. It now employs hardware support from computer manufactures such as HP, Dell and IBM on its notebook ranges.
"Now that there is support from the hardware manufactures, the tracking solution has been given a much needed shot in the arm. We expect to see much greater success for NetTrace Loss Control. It also shows us that the global manufactures are acknowledging notebook theft as a major problem, worldwide! We all need to reduce the exposure of our businesses to this type of risk, not only due to pure hardware loss, but also to sensitive and valuable data loss," states Bass.
For more information, please contact NetTrace.
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