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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.

26 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense by Kr4u53 · · Score: 5, Funny

    What else would someone use a stolen laptop for?

    1. Re:Makes sense by dexmachina · · Score: 5, Funny

      What else would someone use a laptop for, period?

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

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

      --
      hilarious
    3. Re:Makes sense by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 4, Funny

      What else would someone use a laptop for, period?

      Laptops get in the way...

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

      If not reformat completely.

    5. Re:Makes sense by rugatero · · Score: 5, Funny

      Someone's dreaming of a white Christmas....

      --
      This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
  2. The moral of the story by Korbeau · · Score: 5, Informative

    Never leave your laptop on top of your car when carrying other things home!

    What, did you think this thing was portable?

  3. Pft by inKubus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Talk about getting caught with your dick in your hand...

    --
    Cool! Amazing Toys.
  4. What remote access technology? by Max_W · · Score: 5, Interesting
    How could be this done? How could he connect to his laptop without knowing the IP address?

    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.

    1. Re:What remote access technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      He was probably running a dynamic DNS client.

    2. Re:What remote access technology? by jswigart · · Score: 5, Informative

      Prob running something like dyndns or something that would automatically notify the server of the ip address when online, so he simply had to use his registered dyndns name.

    3. Re:What remote access technology? by Schemat1c · · Score: 4, Informative

      How could be this done? How could he connect to his laptop without knowing the IP address?

      One word, DynDNS.

      --

      "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
  5. Re:This is not the first... by shbazjinkens · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is hardly the first time this has ever happened. Why is this on slashdot? Heck there are even better stories of this, such as a woman who used the laptop's webcam to !

    I wonder why he didn't just tap into the webcam on his computer while the perpetrator was... oh wait.

  6. Hey, that guy in the ski mask! by pizzach · · Score: 4, Funny

    CmdrTaco? Is that you?

    --
    Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
  7. TISM! by Director+of+Acronyms · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  8. So frustrated.. by superdave80 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, it must have been sooooo frustrating to have to sit there and watch that porn. Poor bastard!

  9. 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.

    --
  10. Not all reformats help by apankrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

      Let's see it survive a Linux LiveCD.

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    2. Re:Not all reformats help by cp.tar · · Score: 4, Funny

      Linux: the laptop thief's choice.

      --
      Ignore this signature. By order.
    3. Re:Not all reformats help by Soruk · · Score: 5, Informative

      Probably not actually. From TFA:

      Q. What happens if a computer's hard drive is removed?

      A. The Computrace Agent resides on a computer's hard drive so if the drive is removed and installed on another computer, the Agent will initiate contact with the Monitoring Center at its next scheduled call. It will then report its new location. The original computer will no longer be protected.

      If your scenario was correct then it would reinstall the trace software on the new hard disc.

      --
      -- Soruk
    4. Re:Not all reformats help by caluml · · Score: 4, Funny

      .... when I was looking at a hex dump of my BIOS for fun

      Do tell us more about your hobbies and pastimes!

      --
      Get your own free personal location tracker
    5. Re:Not all reformats help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Let's see the thief get online when the LiveCD cannot recognize the laptop's WiFi.

      (*Ducks*)

    6. Re:Not all reformats help by ironwill96 · · Score: 5, Informative

      We have CompuTrace on many of our laptops here at work. Only certain manufacturers have the agent pre-loaded but it is embedded in the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS and put different firmware on it you can wipe it out. CompuTrace won't work if you formatted the machine and put Linux on it since they don't (currently) have a Linux version of their agent.

      CompuTrace is really not a great service though because some of their promise is that they'll recover your laptop in X days or pay you $1000, guaranteed! What they don't tell you is that to keep this "warranty" active you have to make sure that your laptops check in at least once every few weeks or else they call you and demand that you check-in the laptop within a week or lose your warranty.

      This is a real pain when you have laptops that are being taken home by your users and they don't have internet at home or just leave it sitting in a desk drawer for weeks at a time. Trying to track down all of the machines to make sure they are hooked up to the internet to check-in at least once every few weeks is a total mess.

      --
      "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
  11. Re:This is not the first... by utnapistim · · Score: 5, Funny

    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)
  12. oblig fail by Joe+the+Lesser · · Score: 4, Funny

    http://failblog.org/2008/10/01/christmas-candle-fail/

    --
    "I only speak the truth"
    Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)