Slashdot Mirror
Man Uses Remote Logon To Help Find Laptop Thief
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.
What else would someone use a stolen laptop for?
Never leave your laptop on top of your car when carrying other things home!
What, did you think this thing was portable?
Talk about getting caught with your dick in your hand...
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I use remote access, but I have to type in the IP address to connect. How could he knew the I address?
I read this story several times but nowhere the software name is mentioned.
I wonder why he didn't just tap into the webcam on his computer while the perpetrator was... oh wait.
Doesn't this mean that the guy who had his laptop stolen also didn't bother to set a login or boot password? One might argue that he deduced that a boot password or login password might just get his drive wiped by a clever thief. He may have even st up the remote access partly to act as a way to catch thieves and get it back if it was ever lost. He could have even used fairly strong encrpytion to protect most of his data. Of course anyone arguing for the assumption that his sercurity plans were a series of complex plans within plans must have missed the part where he left it on and in his unlocked car.
CmdrTaco? Is that you?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I've seen a thief who was so stupid, that he stole a kid's bike from (directly!) across the back alley, and then left the stolen bike by the back door.
He was, apparently, both surprised and indignant when the father of the child whose bike was stolen came over for a visit.... wielding a baseball bat.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
For those in Australia : looks like his laptop was stolen by TISM. Especially considering the lyrics to this TISM song :
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/t/tism10923/beencaughtwankin434144.html
Never look back at the carnage.
Yeah, it must have been sooooo frustrating to have to sit there and watch that porn. Poor bastard!
In nearby Oroville, CA, a thief robbed a bank at gunpoint, took off with several thousand dollars in cash, and then returned later in the day - to the same bank - to deposit the cash into his own bank account.
no, I'm not kidding.
(And this text box for idle just teh suxorz)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They did a poor job of airbrushing the apple off the back of that macbook.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So the moral of the story is to not have passwords or you won't get your computer back.
Wait, shouldn't it go like this:
1) get WAN IP of computer being used at thief's house(e.g. 66.245.54.53)
2) do reverse DNS IP lookup, see that it belongs to Earthlink or whatever ISP
3a) if it's a fixed IP then we're done, have the Police ask the ISP to whom they assigned the IP (or get a warrant if we're good monkeys)
3b) if it's a dynamic IP then the ISP has to check their logs to see to whom they gave the IP at the time, but they should have that
4) Police show up at the door as above.
Why do you need to be able to remote login and wait for the thief to type his address? I guess the webcam could be useful because you can get a picture of the guy actually using it (instead of the police showing up and the guy saying "I have an open wifi access point, so the real thief must have logged onto my router, which has no logging enabled, w/o my knowledge with the stolen laptop"). But, seriously, shouldn't the WAN IP be enough?
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Not to advertise, but try www.logmein.com, its free, and the you can log in to the computer as if you where sitting in front of it.
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.
The ending of the story is missing.
"After police got hold of the thief and the laptop. Jose Caceres now has his laptop back at home..........with sticky buttons."
Q. Can ComputracePlus be detected?
A. .. snip .. The Agent can survive a hard drive re-format, F-disk command and hard drive re-partitioning.
http://www.absolute.com/computraceplus/faqs.asp
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Three days later, the entire town I live in was flooded with several feet of water from hurricane Ike.
I really wish I had the foresight to install this kind of software on my laptop. Might have helped...
I think protection from hurricanes is beyond its capabilities.
Those who are smart enough to extract private files from a swap partition have better things to do than stealing unattended laptops.
In other words:
1. get your laptop stolen by hot chick (or somebody else, according to your tastes).
2. remote logon.
3. wait for them to look at porn and activate camera
4. ???
5. profit!
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
This really doesn't help you in the case that the thief has stolen your machine and has it physically in his own workshop with his own set of screwdrivers.
If you're paranoid about your security (and in some jobs you should be), then for portable machines you want to encrypt the whole disk - and, ideally, have something that scrubs the disk after N successive failed login attempts, where N is some small number. Yes, of course it's backed up. You're competent aren't you?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Removing all sectors and the wiping the MBR. If it can survive a reformat, it hides in the boot sector like those viruses from way back when. No partitions, no MBR, no place for it to hide.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://failblog.org/2008/10/01/christmas-candle-fail/
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)