LAlarm Relies on USB Thumbdrives to Thwart Laptop Thieves

LAlarm (Laptop Alarm) program looks like a pretty serious attempt to be a poor man's version of laptop security. While you are running this program you are able to use just about every conceivable piece of hardware as a tamper alarm. You can rig up a USB drive's removal to trigger any of a number of alerts or countermeasures. You can play a loud sound file, lock your machine, launch programs or format your drive. You have the option of using other hardware devices as well. You can also use the fact that it's been unplugged from the wall or power supply to fire events. We would love to see the USB Missile System wired into this to defend itself upon tampering.

The most impressive piece of this software is the amount of attention has been given to its long term use. It monitors hard drive health and battery status to make sure you are alerted to any condition that might keep it from functioning properly. It can also make sure your laptop is not used outside of your defined network locations using IP address monitoring. Now unfortunately most of these defenses fail if you detach the battery quick enough and pop the hard drive out to get at the data via an external enclosure. You'll need to be doing disk encryption to cover yourself there. For quick alerts from conventional thieves (noobs) and FREE for personal use this can definitely give you an edge on keeping your laptop safe.