Prey is a useful and easy-to-use
application that would help recover your laptop/iphone from stolen. Once
installed, this application will sleep in the background of your
device's operating systems. And when your laptop is stolen you can tell
it to awake and do magic things. For example, you can tell it to report
the locations of your stolen laptop. You can also request it to pop up
an alert or lock the laptop. This client application can also take
pictures of the thief with your laptop's web cam. These information are
stored in Prey servers and you can then access them from any computer by
visiting
Prey Control Panel and logging using
your account or by accessing your emails.
To start, you will need to download and install the Prey software. Visit the
Prey homepage and, when the page appears click the
Download now button. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click
Save and then choose a location for the downloaded file.
Firefox users should select
Save File to save the download to Firefox's default download folder. Now click the purple
Close button in the
web browser window.
Now locate and double-click the downloaded file to launch the
installation wizard. Work through this, accept the default options and,
at the last screen, ensure the ‘
Configure Prey Settings' box is ticked before clicking
Finish. At the Prey Configurator dialogue box click
OK. At the next stage, ensure ‘
Setup reporting method' is selected and click
Next. Select the ‘
Prey + Control Panel' reporting method and click the
Next button to continue.
As this is the first time Prey has been launched, select
New user and then click
Next.
At the following screen type in your name, email address and enter a
password. Now type in a name for the computer so it can be easily
identified later and choose
Desktop or
Portable from the
Device dropdown list. Then click the
Create button to open a Prey account. Click the
OK button to confirm and then click
OK again to close the Prey Configurator.
Prey will now send a confirmation email, so launch your email program
and check for the message. When it arrives, open it and click the link
in the body of the email to complete the sign-up process. After a moment
the web browser will launch and display the Prey login page. Type in
the email address and password entered in Step 3 and then click the
Login button.
The Prey control panel appears with the device listed - a notebook PC,
in our case. To set up how Prey monitors and reports on this PC, click
the picture of the device. Scroll down the settings and ensure that the
Notify new reports option is set to
Yes (as Prey will
send emails when it wants to alert you of something) and then set the
frequency of the reports to an appropriate number of minutes - the
default is 20 which should be fine. To finish setting up Prey, click the
Modules link at the top.
Now we need to set up the
Report modules that tell
Prey what information we want to see should our laptop get lost or
stolen. Start by turning the Network setting to
On. This opens
a selection of options that can help trace a missing computer. Ensure
that all three options - Active Connections, Wifi Hotspots and Trace
Route are also set to On. Then turn the Session button to
On. The key setting here is
Get Screenshot, which will allow Prey to surreptitiously grab a picture of whatever is currently being displayed on the PC's screen.
Finally, be sure to set both the Webcam and Geo switch to
On.
This will allow Prey to take control of your PC's webcam (if it has
one) and take a photo of whoever is using the computer, as well as using
any nearby Wifi hotspots to generate a
Google Map showing an approximation of its location. When done, click the orange
Save changes button at the bottom right of the screen. To test it, click the
Configuration link at the top again and then set the Missing option to
Yes. Then click
Save changes.
Prey now believes that our notebook PC is missing and has been set up to
report back every 20 minutes. Obviously the information that Prey can
deliver depends on whether the PC is being used, has a camera and is
connected to the Internet. As soon as an
Internet connection
is detected, you will receive an email from Prey confirming that your
device is marked as missing. Then, 20 minutes later another will arrive
to say that a report is available. Open the email and click the link.
If necessary, sign into the Prey website again. The missing computer
will be flagged with a red screen and a large green button next to it
labelled ‘New report'. As reports come in, they will be flagged here and
listed down the left-hand side. The free version of Prey will store up
to 10 reports per registered device. Click the
New report button to continue.
If everything is working, here is what you will get. A report that shows
the location of the missing computer based on nearby Wifi networks. If
the computer has a webcam attached (our missing notebook has one built
in), you will even get a photo of the perpetrator. All of this
information is recorded covertly, so a thief has no idea what's going
on. If the traced computer was stolen, we would strongly advise passing
the information gathered by Prey on to the police.
