How in the Tech

Using USB thumb drives to lock and unlock your PC

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 4, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Security

A few weeks back I wrote to you about how to use a bluetooth device to lock your PC when it’s out of range. The process is quite practical save for one glaring problem, perhaps. Not all of us have bluetooth devices and even few of us have bluetooth functionality on our computers. If that sounds like your situation I’ve got a similar solution using hardware that everyone has – USB ports and an available thumb drive.

Predator is one such piece of free software that can utilize any size thumb drive as a physical token to lock and unlock a computer. When you get up to leave, simply take the thumb drive with you; upon return, return the drive to an available USB port – Predator handles the rest, after some initial configuration of course.

Once installed, Predator needs to do some initial prep work on the thumb drive you wish to use. The process isn’t destructive to the existing data however, Predator will encode a key file onto the device that is referenced by the software in order to lock or unlock. Additional features are also available that tend to relate to the security and privacy aspects that go along with locking a PC; such as, minimizing all windows, hiding the desktop icons, or dimming the display.

At this point you should be wondering what happens if you lose the paired USB thumb drive, or it otherwise becomes damaged. Because Predator disables Task Manager and CTRL+ALT+DEL, the only way to unlock is typically with the device. However, one of the configuration options involves setting a back-up password just for this purpose – actually it’s required.

Predator is available both in free and professional versions but in my opinion, the free version includes everything you’d need to secure your PC painlessly.

Download Predator