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Man Uses Remote Logon To Help Find Laptop Thief

Posted by samzenpus on from the cyber-bloodhound dept.

After his computer was stolen, Jose Caceres used a remote access program to log on every day and watch it being used. The laptop was stolen on Sept. 4, when he left it on top of his car while carrying other things into his home. "It was kind of frustrating because he was mostly using it to watch porn," Caceres said. "I couldn't get any information about him." Last week the thief messed up and registered on a web site with his name and address. Jose alerted the police, who arrested a suspect a few hours later. The moral of the story: never go to a porn site where you have to register.

4 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Makes sense by William+Robinson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Note to self: Remove remote access after stealing laptop!!!!

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    hilarious
  2. Re:Makes sense by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If not reformat completely.

  3. They want easy by TheLink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah. Thieves who steal laptops want _easy_.

    If they didn't mind hard they'd have got a job or started their own companies, or stolen something more challenging and rewarding ;).

    So what you do on your laptop is to create an account specially for thieves to use. Call it Honey if you like - with no password, or the password hint = instructions on how to get in.

    Then your own account has a password, to keep the thief out, from deleting your encrypted stuff etc.

    This way when the thief steals the laptop, they turn it on, click on "Your Account", get password prompt, click on Honey, get in straight - whoopee.

    Immediately the stuff is launched to log data about the thief and his surroundings - webcam, microphone set to record, and then the data is uploaded.

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  4. Re:Not all reformats help by setagllib · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's see it survive a Linux LiveCD.

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    Sam ty sig.