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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.
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.
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)
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
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