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Stolen computers ?

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by jsarinana

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We were burglarized over the weekend and the thief?s got away with 2 workstations and a laptop. Question, all of these computers were on the network and running Windows 2000 SP2. How difficult is it for someone to get into a users hard drive (one ofthese stolen computers)? . I?m thinking a thief could boot the computer from diskette and read all data on the hard drive, is this true?

second question if I know the mac address of these computer is there anyway to track them down if these NIC'sare used on the Internet ?

4 replies

by dmiles

Answer 1
Yes it is possible to get access to the hard drive if their is no passwords setup to protect the computer from intrusion,most likely the thief will wipe the drives clean and reinstall the operating systems and will not use the current system.
No,It is not possible to track without tracking software installed on the computer.
There is technology to track laptops,when thaey are stolen but they need the software installed on the computer

by timwalsh

First issue: A determined person can access the data on those hardrives in a couple of different ways. If they are formated as FAT or FAT32, all the thief needs is a Win98 Boot disk. If they are formatted NTFS, the thief can't boot and read the drives without some special utilities. However, he can always remove the drives and stick them on another Win2K computer and access them.
Second issue: Realistically, there's no way to track a computer's location with the MAC address from the NIC.The NICs can be removed. The computers can be placed behind a firewall. There is no way for an ISP to determine what packets are coming from a given computer (or what computer is sending certain packets). The only possibility may be with some broadband ISPS that register MAC addresses (vs. user ID and password) as a means of determining access authorization.

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