Burglar Nabbed By Backup Program

Bruce Perens writes "A Berkeley, California, burglar engineered his own arrest, and that of his girlfriend, when he stole a laptop and used it as his personal computer. He didn't realize that the laptop had an automatic backup program, and that the photos he took were being copied to his victim's backup repository. Berkeley police recognized him, and his location, from the photos."

Comments

Getting to be a cliche

[gbulmash]

How many times do we have to see this story? There's the famous stolen SideKick from June 2006, then a few months later there was this story about a stolen phone that automatically mailed pics to Flickr, and on and on and on. This is becoming a cliche "stupid thief" story.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[rarel]

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the dupes come from the backup repository every few month automatically.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[Nick Ives]

Amateur criminals will always be funny. The real joke here is that the thief didn't pass the laptop onto a fence straight away, keeping and using things you've stolen is the dumbest thing to do if you're a thief!

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[rackserverdeals]

I mean, how hard is to reformat a pc?

And how was he going to get windows back on it? Just because he's a thief, doesn't mean he's a pirate. :)

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Note to self: steal the OS install disk too.

Re:Getting to be a cliche

[Dr_Barnowl]

If the owner was complying with the Windows EULA, the license sticker was firmly applied to the computer, so he only needs a install disk ; the serial number is already there.

A product here?

[jimmyhat3939]

The question is whether there's some product that could be installed for this specific purpose. Laptops with webcams seem like they'd be a reasonable target. Also, I seem to recall something being installed right into the bios to facilitate this sort of recovery. Or even something involving MAC addresses. Most thieves aren't smart enough to change those, and on a laptop I'm not sure you could even really do that in hardware (though I know you can do it in software, on linux at least)

Re:A product here?

[Nikker]

Since this is /., 1 cron job and an addition to your /etc/rc.local(or distro equiv.) would do the trick. You could first use mencoder to capture and video sources (using command line it will take snaps at intervals all on its own) and rsync as you cron job taking the diffs of the whole drive to online storage, bonus points to trigger a sync the moment the network route becomes available. Nifty idea would be to set up a gmail account and use it to store incremental backups rather than the original image, 7-8 GB of diffs could likely go a long way.

Re:A product here?

[HydroPhonic]

You don't need a backup to facilitate recovery- just transmission of the fresh data. If my girlfriend's laptop ever disappears, the keylogger I've conveniently installed on it might be enough :)

The AntiVir and Spybot installations on this machine are configured with exceptions for this exact product, and it will reliably send me keylogs, web histories, and screenshots every 20 minutes (or whenever it finds a connection). But it doesn't capture from the webcam....

Re:A product here?

[Twinky]

I do sincerely hope your girlfriend knows about this. Does she?

Well that's just stupid

[drsquare]

You don't use the laptop you steal, you sell it down the pub or gut it for parts.

Amateur.

Re:Which backup program

[David Gerard]

Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.