I recently had a portable thumb drive of mine stolen from me while I was at work. I was wondering if anyone has heard of or know of any kind of application that would be useful in recovering the drive, or atleast trace routing to anyone who would happen to have loaded the drive onto their pc. I was thinking about adding something to the autoplay to have it "dial-home". I know of several ways to do this using certian types of viruses, but I wasn't wanting something quite so malicious. I was thinking about a small application that would just send an email, or anything with IP address information to a set email account. I know that the drive is long gone now, I just would like to be able to take some proactive steps in the future.
New: Kanri (Oct 9, '24), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, '24)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
No Ads November!, Please donate today
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
Windows ignores the Open= line in AutoRun.inf for USB drives. Putting an autorun program on it won't be much help for something like this. Plus, even if the person was stupid enough to run the "phone home" program, the best you'd get is an IP address and some system specs (since collecting any more info than that would be an invasion of that person's privacy and probably illegal). Hard to track a person by their IP address, since IPs get shuffled around so much. And system specs don't do you much good, either.
-
fatcerberus@yahoo.com [aim: fatcerberus]
I have no witty remarks or quotes to share at the moment.
for the lost situation is it not posible to install a peice of software that would show the contact phone number at start up when inserted?
Graham Yates
Good luck. As I said, Windows ignores the Open= line in autorun.inf for removable devices. All executables on the drive have to be started manually--there's no way to make one run automatically (Windows does this to prevent autorun viruses from automagically ruining the computer on drive insertion).
-
fatcerberus@yahoo.com [aim: fatcerberus]
I have no witty remarks or quotes to share at the moment.
The recommended method is to create a text file called owner.txt in the root directory. Include your contact info and, optionally, an offer of compensation if the drive is returned.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!