Our campus PD recently contacted me to retrieve some MAC address info. Apparently they are going to team with another local campus to track stolen equipment between the two campuses.
There are some obvious challenges, like keeping the lists sync'd, what to do after a stolen laptop shows up on another campus, incorrect MAC reporting leading to false-positives, but does anyone have any thoughts on this? Would this be useful on a wider scale? i.e. multiple campuses involved in and out of state? --Joe -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Cal Frye Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 7:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Detecting Stolen Laptops... Hector J Rios wrote: > Once in a while we get calls from the university police department > asking us to search for stolen laptops. We use the stolen laptop's MAC > address to search in both DHCP and WCS (we are a Cisco shop). We've > never been successful in recovering a stolen laptop. So far the thieves > have been smart enough not to ever bring those laptops back into our > campus. I'm curious to know if any of you have come up with a way to > automate the detection of a wireless device. Something like waiting for > a laptop's MAC to come on the wireless network and immediately sending > an email to an operator. Ours is a somewhat lower-tech approach than some listed here. We enter the MACs into dhcp to receive special addresses. Then What's Up pages me when those addresses show up again. Then I can go and start walking the system for locations. We've successfully retrieved a couple, but the majority of laptops that go walkies never reappear on our network. Once in a while we see one show up for a couple of minutes only and vanish again; typically around our AP's that are visible from downtown restaurants. I've never had those on the air long enough to send Security over to have a look, unfortunately. -- Regards, -- Cal Frye, Network Administrator, Oberlin College Mudd Library, x.56930 -- CIT will NEVER ask you for your password! www.calfrye.com, www.pitalabs.com "Accomplishments have no color. --Leontyne Price. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
