Password Recovery from stolen hard drive

[Ray Parrish]

p.echols at comcast.net wrote:
> ----- "Maxime Alarie" <malarie at processia.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Im not a security expert, but I'd say Yes and no.
>>
>> Chances are that when he finds out its Linux under the hood, he 'll
>> wipe
>> it clean  and install Windows (or ask a friend to do it), that is if
>> he
>> did not sold it.
>>     
>
> Police say it was probably sold within the hour.  If it gets wiped, then I don't care any more.  It's done and gone.
> The concern is if it was sold to identity thieves.  Can they get access to my passwords and then access my accounts.
>
>
>   
>> He can reset your password if he is able to reset the root password,
>> which require some grub knowledge or if  he's patient enough to read
>> some documentation on how to do it
>>     
>
> Yah, I better change all my passwords.  Bleah!
>
>
>
>   
>> If I can suggest..  Make a script that sends its ip adress   (i.e: at
>> the last line of the networking script)to your email account (gmail,
>> hotmail,etc..) at boot time.. That way you might be able to do what
>> you
>> want with your pc as soon as it hits the net. :)
>>
>>     
>
> How would you script that?  9 times out of 10 I expect that the laptop would report a private address like 192.168.0.15  Useless information unless I had a way to log back into the laptop from where ever I was.  A pipe dream I think.
>   
Just write a script which send you an email via sendmail or some other 
mail serving program on  your computer. When you receive that email, it 
will contain the actual ip address the email was sent from in the email 
headers.


I'm glad that other guy mentioned this, I think I'll write a script to 
do that on my machine to protect it from theft. It's  great idea!

Later, Ray Parrish

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