General Motors (GM) is a multinational automotive company based in Detroit, Michigan. GM produces and sells some of the top performing vehicles including Buick, Chevrolet, GMC and Cadillac totaling 2.6 million vehicles sold worldwide.

With over 165,000 employees internationally, GM provides a variety of devices to their employees to assist with their work. With all these devices it is inevitable that some are lost or stolen, exposing vulnerabilities to proprietary data and applications. To mitigate this vulnerability GM must go into the device and perform a manual shutdown to revoke access.

Our Recovery of Lost and Stolen IT Assets system streamlines the process of remotely shutting down lost or stolen devices. Our software makes it easy to detect when a device has been misplaced, at which point the device is then automatically locked until it is returned or an administrator logs in.

Once an IT administrator marks a device’s location as unknown, a signal is sent out to the device through network communications. On receipt, the lockdown initiation begins by disabling all other users except the administrator account, which is reset with a new password. After lockdown, a confirmation email is sent back confirming the device’s status. Upon relocating the device, the IT administrator can log in and recover data held on the devices. This prevents the use of the device and incentivizes its return to GM.

Our software automates the remote lockdown process of GM devices and gives employees the ability to check the status of a device as well. This increases the security of the proprietary data and applications.

Our front end is built with JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The back end is built on a Dockerized Flask application running PowerShell scripts and Python. Finally, our database utilizes PostgreSQL.