07 February 2006

Hacking Undercover

Undercover has generated a huge amount of buzz on the web. This has resulted in great coverage (overall very positive), but also in one or two weird "reviews" in which all kinds of claims are made, based on a 'taking the application apart' approach. While some of these claims were correct, many more are absolutely false and that's why I'm not linking them here. More importantly, none of these claims are still true for Undercover 1.5.

We really want Undercover to be the best and most secure theft-recovery application on the planet, so we did not stop after fixing the few issues that were raised. We wanted our software to be really, really secure..... therefore we hired a hacker. Not just some teenage wannabe, a real one named Mike. We sent him a license key and let him play with the Undercover 1.5 beta. We were delighted to learn that he only found one issue and something that could be easily fixed.

Conclusion: we are pretty confident that Undercover 1.5 is one of the most secure applications on your Mac. It is absolutely impossible for a thief to remove the application without knowing the Admin password. You don't have to take our word for it, you can try it yourself.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds great, though I know not what issues were raised. Still, as much as I trust Mike's skill, I encourage you to continue to be most vigilant and to keep Undercover hack-free as you go on. Cheers.

Anonymous said...

It's always possible to just reset the firmware password (if there even is one) and re-install. Luckily, the average thief has no clue how to do either of those things.

If a skilled OS X user steals your laptop, he's not going to start doing memory dumps and trying to locally exploit the Undercover process.. if he knows that much, he knows the easy way of doing it as well.

Anonymous said...

Hi all.

Just wanted to stress that, if a theif reseted the firmware password by zapping the RAM, you still have to count on the theif KNOWING you have Undercover installed.