Undercover recovers four MacBooks at once

One of our clients in Sweden, Mr. Kenneth Burman, works as a system administrator at Krakbergsskolan, a K12 school.

As a farsighted administrator, he started to search for solutions of protecting the school's computers against theft soon after his new batch of MacBooks arrived. Mr. Kenneth Burman purchased a volume education license of Undercover, which he immediately deployed on all MacBooks in his school. This is a decision that Mr. Kenneth Burman has not regretted making, as on 3 April 2007 he received a phone call from his school that made one of his farsighted predictions of possible theft come true...

A real bad morning

"Early in the morning on April 3, I received a phone call from school. Four of the newly purchased MacBooks were gone- a thief had paid a visit to our school. I couldn't believe my ears. No, it is not true, I thought, that our new MacBooks could be gone, but yes it was true: we missed 4 of them." The thief had smashed an outdoor window on the second floor and took with him 4 brand new MacBooks although all entrances were securely locked.

After Mr. Kenneth Burman hung up the phone, he quickly wrote an email to Orbicule to alert them about the theft. Orbicule's team had promptly replied to this theft by entering the data in the system and patiently waited for the stolen computers to get connected to the Internet, in order to initiate further actions.

Coming online

Fortunately, it did not take the thief long to come online as he had no idea that the computers he stole were running Undercover. Within 9 hours of the computers being stolen, our recovery center was sending Mr. Kenneth Burman the screen shots of the web sites and programmes a totally clueless thief was going through as well as the snapshots of the thief himself. Later, Mr. Kenneth Burman delivered this information to the local police office. Real samples of the screenshots and iSight pictures taken by Undercover can be seen below. Some details are blurred in order to protect everyone's privacy.

As a result of the stolen computers being connected to the Internet, Orbicule could acquire the network information that had become the solving key to this case. With the network information sent both to the local police and the Internet provider and a further collaboration between both parties, the police were able to obtain the physical address of the thief. From that moment forward, it was a waiting game for both Mr. Kenneth Burman and Orbicule before the rapidly unfolding events would reach their culminating point.

Some good news

On April 8, only 5 days after the theft, Mr. Kenneth Burman received another phone call but this time from the police. "When the police called me and informed me that all computers had been recovered, I was ecstatic". The information supplied by Undercover and the recovery center was paramount in assisting the police and enabling a rapid recovery of the stolen Macs.

"Undercover is the greatest tool for recovery of stolen computers", Mr. Burman continues. "Our school has already decided to deploy Undercover on all its future computers. Thanks to Undercover our school could retrieve its Macs. We basically got back our four MacBooks for only $9.99 per Mac, or less than $40 in total. Therefore, instead of spending money on replacing Macs, this money could be utilized for other future investments. Thanks again to all people at Orbicule for a great job on this product."

Mr. Kenneth Burman is a system administrator at www.krakbergsskolan.se, North Sweden