Mac Thief Caught Thanks To Applescript & Timbuktu

el.cerrito.slasher sent in an amusing bit found on MacSlash. This story is a tale of a stolen iMac that just happened to be running Timbuktu (a remote control program like VNC I believe). Well the stolen box kept getting used, and the owner was able to track it down through a variety of amusing Timbuktu Fu. Funny story.

Comments

Re:Can I do this with my laptop?

[MaxH01]

Isn't that what Windows XP does - except it phones Bill Gates?

Re:applescript strikes back

[gazbo]

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}

Yikes! That is some urglee code. I mean come on, since when has code used a possessive apostrophe? It's just......wrong.

I'll grant it's wonderfully readable, but in people's experience, is it actually easy to write? I can imagine having difficulty remembering all of the exact 'easy-to-use' identifiers. Also, in some cases it seemed to match good grammar, whereas in other cases parts of verbs, plurals etc. were not used correctly. Is there a set of special cases you have to remember or what?

lamers

[Rinikusu]

Seriously.

If you were really serious about inflicting pain, how about:

setting up one of those $125 per call phone lines in the bahamas and then having the imac call it every 2 minutes...

repeatedly call 911 and play recorded message: "help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" over and over again

install a keylogger so you can post their most intimate conversations on your website.

those are just a few ideas that have popped in my head.. Hell, you could do that with VB email virii and make a mint with the first one...

Re:lamers

[buckrogers]

I like your idea of having the iMac call the 900 number for cash. If it called enough times you could buy a brand new computer.

I'm thinking that you need to turn off the speakers, turn off the modem sound and if there has been no activity for a few hours, at 4am have the system call that $125 number about 20 times in just a few hours.

With this scheme you could sell reconditioned iMacs setup with this software out of the back of a van for about $100 apeice and just sit back and rake in the cash. The people who bought what they thought was stollen property will never say a word as long as you only ripped them off for a couple of thousand dollars.

So, people, if you buy computers from the back of a van, don't complain when you get ripped off. :) You were warned!

Re:lamers

[petej]

"Hello, Miss Cleo? My name is Eliza."

Re:Can I do this with my laptop? ... Yes, In theor

[Anne Thwacks]

Don't bother with BIOS Passwords - that would require a bios hack, to say the least.

The boot sector is replaced with a BSD style boot selector, set to boot from the "stolen" partition by default (ie if you are using the machine yourself, you select BSD or Windows - thief has 5 secs to figure out what is wrong, and cant, so gets default behaviour.

After the initial boot sector process, control passes to a next stage, "Stolen" ... This displays a message "Unable to start Windows ... perhaps modem cable is not connected to the phone? ... Please connect cable to phone, and press return"

The average thief will understand this, and connect the phone cable. The real owner would press CTL-ALT-DEL.

When the thief connects the cable and presses "enter" the phone dials the owner, his mates, his mobile, his dog, cat, ma, pa, and the 911, 999 (in case its in Europe), FPI's private number, SWAT, the US Marines, Bin Laden, the Mafia hit-man hot line, and that number the Gas Company reserves for reporting leaking gas mains.

Not only that, the boot sequence will auto-hack so this is the ONLY boot option, and disable CTL-ALT-DEL. The dialling sequence will repeat till the battery runs out.

Someone will be pissed enough to find out who owns the unlisted number and send the boys with big sticks round for a visit.

Not the first Mac thief to be caught

[b1t r0t]

Back in the late '80s, a friend of mine had one of the first Apple HD-20 hard drives. At a user group meeting someone stole the computer and hard drive. But not the boot disk. See, this wierd hard drive hooked up to the floppy port, and until the 512e/Mac Plus ROM, you had to have a special boot disk which contained a replacement floppy driver to use it.

So he called up all the places in town that sold Macs (all two or three of them) and waited. Sure enough the idiot kid shows up at a store asking about an HD-20 boot disk. Snagged!

The difference now is that the internet is everywhere, and it's now possible to have the computer "phone home".