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Laptop Thief Caught via AOL Login
Mundocani writes "Yahoo (Reuters) is reporting that the FBI has caught the guy who stole computers from Wells Fargo. The interesting part is that 'Investigators traced the computer to Krastof when he logged onto his own America Online account at home through one of the stolen computers.' Makes you wonder what sort of hooks the FBI has into AOL or other ISPs and what hardware identification is being transmitted at login."
Running Jaguar I set up a fake account with no password on purpose. If my laptop was stolen I WANTED the thief to use it to get online. My real accounts were hidden from the login screen and my home folder was invisible. I had a penny-per-minute dialup ISP set up to make it easy for the thief to get connected. Using DNS update software I would be able to see the IP address at Dyndns.org if it was ever used.
If the thief was to find the computer locked down from the start then they'd be far more likely to wipe and restore making this a lot more difficult.
Unfortunately, now running Panther and making user account invisible makes the fast user switching a buggy nightmare. So in spite of the extra security features like FileVault I think it less likely I would ever see it again if it were stolen. I liked my security through obscurity.
Were they not running a password protected operating system, at least Windows 2000 or Windows XP?
You must be kidding, but I'm not sure.
It takes only a few minutes to change the administrator password on a Windows box with a Linux boot floppy.
Done it a couple of times (on Windows 2000), for users who didn't know the admin password.
why is it that when the police do something smart with computers...
And when they can't solve a computer crime case...
Because the issue is how they do it. News items appear slam the police for success and ridicule them for failure simply becuase news items are not a representitve sampling of reality! The police have a hundreds of successes every day, but who cares to write about them or read them? It only becomes a news item when the police have a success AND they did something wrong or controvercial in the process. The same goes for their failures - it only becomes newsworthy when someone really screwed up.
As for this particular story it is all about how the police caught the guy. It appears that Slashdot botched the story in this case. Another news site reports that the guy did NOT log into his own AOL account, he logged into an AOL account belonging to the owner of the machine. If that's the case then there really isn't any story here. If some moron steals my wallet and then shows up at bank trying to use my safety deposit key then there's no problem grabbing him and throwing him in prision.
I was going to continue with an example of police methods that would not have been acceptable, but lets skip arguing over specifics. Suffice it to say that there *are* a wide variety of unacceptable methods. If you don't agree with that then you are a far greater threat to this country than any terrorist with a bomb.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.