Password Recovery from stolen hard drive

[Mike Yates]

On Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:31:18 -0700 Ray Parrish wrote:

> Well, the idea assumes a couple of things, the first of which is that 
> the thief has to be smart enough to change your password, and then must 
> boot the computer into Ubuntu, and then must then connect the computer 
> to the internet.
>
> . Once that was done, a script added to the boot up scripts could use 
> sendmail to send an email using your email account, which would then 
> give you the ip address it was connected to.
>
> I'm not sure if I even have sendmail on here yet, so it may be while 
> before I get around to writing this script, as I have other irons in the 
> fire burning pretty hot right now.
>
>
>   
Actually, I have been putting scripts like this onto laptops for some years.
I won't paste one here here because they differ a lot.
They need to operate at boot-time, not log-in, so the best plan is to 
ping e.g download.microsoft.com (I don't mind annoying them, Maxime!) 
every thirty seconds until successful, then email yourself using direct 
smtp to your ISP's MX pointer, not via a smarthost, the usual default, 
which will not work from a different ISP.
It is almost as easy to do that in Windoze as in Linux, installing it as 
a service and using bmail.exe, Craig Peacock's clever command-line 
mailer. In Linux, you need different arguments to the mail command, 
depending if you have Exim, Sendmail, etc. to avoid the smarthost. There 
is no need to get the external IP as the headers reveal that.

I have to admit that none of my installations have been stolen, AFAIK, 
but it was quite useful to track errant company salesmen!

-- 
Mike Yates           Frome   Somerset   England