Jerime Anderson, a reserve point guard for the UCLA basketball team, had been suspended after being arrested Tuesday evening by campus police on suspicion of grand theft for allegedly stealing a laptop computer. The 6-foot-2 senior was arrested on campus after tracking software like GadgetTrak installed on a MacBook Pro valued at $1,500 helped the owner lead police to Anderson, said Nancy Greenstein, a spokeswoman for UCLA Police. He was booked at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station and released on $20,000 bail.

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When St. Mary’s College student Michael Kuzmack lost his laptop last semester just before finals, he was crushed. But then he remembered he had software on it - called GadgetTrak - that enabled him to catch the crook. When the thief finally turned it on, the laptop’s camera immediately took a photo of the suspect.

“I was really angry, but then I was thankful that I had indeed installed GadgetTrak … and I got all this information and the chances of recovering the laptop were really good.”

The software also pinpointed his exact address in Richmond. And transmitted the information to Michael’s email. Moraga police were able to zero in, make an arrest, and recover his laptop.

“We’re able to find a GPS coordinate of where the particular person is, get a search warrant, and we’re able to retrieve that laptop, so we’ve had really great successes with some of these products,” says Mary Kusmiss of the Berkeley police department.

Many celebrities use GadgetTrak software for this very reason. Our software is on tour with quite a few musicians, many big names you would know, as well as actors and other professionals. The fact that we not only allow them the ability to track stolen devices, but can do so without a back door into their systems are key reasons they have placed their trust in us.

Want your stolen gear back? Don’t call some gung-ho superhero who’s as likely to blow up your small grocery store as he is to catch those perps, call GadgetTrak instead. The little startup company has grown since we last heard of it back in 2007, and is now operating a $25 per year tracking service that has delivered a statistically significant 95 percent success rate on reuniting gadgets with their owners. Available for Mac OS and Windows laptops, as well as mobile phones (BlackBerrys, WinMo, and iPhone) and even removable USB storage, the software’s intelligent enough to remotely activate your webcam and ping the incriminating info back directly to you — no data is sent to GadgetTrak. Check out some recent news coverage of the software and its implementation in local schools after the break.

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“They kicked the front door in, so I would invest that $50. It’s an investment well worth it,” said Kari Hardre.

Stealthy Laptop Software Captures Photos & Location of Laptop Thief - Springfield, Oregon from Ken Westin on Vimeo.

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The laptop exchanged hands a few times with a full audit trail left thanks to  GadgetTrak’s software, which has had a number of successful recoveries over the past few months including one in Brooklyn, New York and another in Oakland, California all of which unveiled larger crimes and theft rings.

The “Computrace” software, made by Vancouver-based Absolute Software Corp., is part of a subscription service that’s used to find lost or stolen computers. Many people don’t know it’s on their machines, but it’s included in computers from the biggest PC makers.

The software is built into computers at the factory because that embeds it so deeply that even the extreme act of uninstalling the operating software won’t delete it. The software is included in a part of the computer known as the BIOS, which refers to programs used to boot the computer.

The service Absolute sells can be valuable because sensitive data can be purged remotely from a stolen machine. The computer is still able to reach out to a specially designated Web site for instructions even if a criminal is tampering with the machine.

But research by Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco with Boston-based Core Security Technologies, and presented Thursday at the Black Hat security conference here, shows it can cut two ways.

If a criminal has infected a computer that has the Computrace technology, he can take deep control of a machine.

That’s because he’s able to modify the computer’s settings to maintain a connection with that machine even if the operating software is uninstalled then reinstalled — an extreme way, but sometimes the only way, to make sure a computer is cleaned of viruses.

“You have something that’s pre-installed, and considered non-malicious, that you can manipulate and turn into a malicious program — that’s pretty unique,” said Ivan Arce, Core Security’s chief technology officer.

Arce said Absolute can fix the problem with an update to the software that is then pushed out to affected computers. He added that users can disable the software’s ability to be a problem on their own, too. It takes some technical know-how, though.

“It’s not hard to block once you know what to look for,” Arce said.

Absolute spokesman Craig Clark said the company would comment after Core’s presentation Thursday, but then did not make anyone available. He said Absolute’s technical team “needs to understand the concerns Core has raised before they can speak to it accurately.”

Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher with Kaspersky Lab, said the vulnerabilities Core Security found could be a “pretty big challenge for the security community” if they’re exploited. But he added that the special access a hacker can get is undermined somewhat by the fact malicious programs they try to download still have to come into the computer the same way they always do, and can be protected against.

Any files that download “will not be stealth, they will not be hiding, they will be visible on the system,” Schouwenberg said. “Anti-malware (software) will be able to scan them. It could have been a whole lot worse.”