Security and legal question

[JG42122]

I run a pc repair shop and we repair laptops and pcs for people in our community 90% of the ones we fix are Dells because they are worthless, but thanks to Dell I have a job.
Some time last year around October I received a laptop from a customer the hard drive was dead on it, and I hooked up my portable hard drive, booted windows and checked it for any problems system wise it had none. Then I did a complete reinstall of windows on the previous Hd and it worked fine. I gave the laptop back to the client and that was the end of that or so I thought.

The laptop was stolen and it had low jack installed on the BIOS of the laptop. When I booted the laptop from my portable hard drive it reinstalled low jack in to my main computer database. For those of you who do not know what low jack is it is a system used by the police that comes installed in the bios of most newer dell pc's if a laptop is stolen and the hd is wiped clean it automatically rewrites itself onto the new hard drive through the bios. Low jack then spreads through the pc and signals the authorities of your ip address your system it gives them access to every file screen shot and even keystroke you make.

So I find out that for the last year this low jack company has had access to every thing I have done online every time I plugged in my external hard drive to my computer. They have been monitoring my emails all of my passwords everything. The cops come and obviously their is no computer here but low jack is still pinging my ip address saying that it is connected to my system.

Honestly I am not even for sure now if it has not somehow spread to my main pc as well, nor if it even came from the customer above because we work on so many of them , we also get in mother boards from everywhere I have about 30 different ones and if a Motherboard is broke we scrap them, strip them for every part we can and then trash them if it works we build laptops out of them so it could be on any one of them.
I have explained this all to the authorities and they knew I had a computer company because they have been reading all my emails for the last year but they are still giving me the old "well you better figure out who you got the motherboard , or laptop from between august to October of last year or we will charge you with receiving stolen property" and their is no way these things come from flea markets, pawn shops, yard sales, everywhere and when you go pick up ten mother boards every couple weeks you eventually end up with so many that you have absolutely no idea where they come from.

So what should I do first off I took everything I had to their office and they have no way of running the tags on all the boards, and chips I have they did look at the serial numbers I have on the laptops.

Second, How do I even figure out where this low jack crap is to trash it ? Or do I need to destroy everything pc related in my home which could ruin my business .

Third do I have any shot at seeking any type of law suit against these guys for invasion of privacy?

[wige]

Wait, you don't wipe the hard drive after connecting it to a computer? How do you prevent BIOS-resident viruses from spreading into other systems?

Anyway, to find the affected hardware, you would probably need to set up a trap on your router, so it will log whatever local IP is talking to the lo-jack systems. I'd rather not be any more specific just in case. This system does not send anything beyond location information until the system is reported stolen. I don't think you would have any grounds for a law suit - at worst, if your clients' data was exposed as a result of this, you might be liable, since you caused the software to come into the network. That is just an opinion though. IANAL.

[JG42122]

Yes I do normally wipe it after a reinstall but I had honestly gotten by without having to do it and some days we would work on several a day I made a mistake I admit that 100% my fault.

However for a company to sit around and monitor you for 9 months watching your every move before sending someone to investigate to me does not sound right. I can understand if it was the authorities/ US. government agency but not some software company from another country who has created a legal virus.

Furthermore after doing some research on the company I did find 100s of complaints and mistakes on their part where they would start tracking peoples pc's and even cars and report them missing and the items be at home with their owners so its not a full proof system they have.

They also have 4 lawsuits pending 2 of which are by their own employees and one from an Ohio lady who was in the same situation as me.