Prey’s new capability locks and alarms laptops, phones and tablets during non-use hours

Prey, provider of the cross-platform, open source anti-theft software that protects more than eight million mobile devices, announced Scheduled Automations, a new capability available to Enterprise and Education customers.

Prey’s Scheduled Automations provide a simple way to schedule and enforce mobile device management (MDM) policies that respond to triggers such as low battery level, hardware changes, or geofencing movement detection.

Managers can use the new automation function to set rules for an organization’s mobile devices that deter or prevent off-hours use or to lock devices on specific days, hours, and date ranges. Prey Automations can be set to take action by displaying a message on the device or devices, sounding an alarm, or locking devices and their data.

“Prey’s Scheduled Automations were designed to save users time by streamlining manually-executed actions. Furthermore, it is an important improvement when it comes to reaction time when a device’s location conditions are deemed unsafe–the system can react automatically to secure the devices’ data and start gathering recovery evidence,” said Carlos Yaconi, founder and CEO of Prey Inc.

“With Scheduled Automations, hospitals can lock access to laptops or tablets outside of office hours. Schools can use Prey to enforce curfews for tablet, Chromebook or smartphone use. And enterprises can set automation rules for low battery devices.”

The initial release of Scheduled Automations includes six pre-configured events (with certain limitations for operating systems). Actions can be triggered by:

• Exact time — Set an action to occur at a specific date and execution time;
• Repeat time — Set an action to be executed on specific days and hours, recurrently or in a date range;
• Low battery — Activate a reaction when a device OS detects that battery ́power is low;
• Hardware changes — Trigger a response when Prey detects a change of hardware in a device (system, motherboard, CPU, RAM or network interfaces);
• Stop charging — Detect and react to a device that is unplugged from its power source;
• Start charging — Detect when a device is plugged into a power source, with automated reaction.