Slashdot Mirror
Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets
Kilrah_il writes "A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglary, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. '"Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites," said Capt. Ron Dickerson. "We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites."' Well, I guess the prophecies came true."
There was a group or person that was using twitter, to find targets
They looked for status messages saying people were on vacation. A bit different from using Places.
The burglary ring were captured after being identified using fireworks they had previously stolen from a property. Police were reported to say "We blew open the case after an explosion of similar burglaries. One suspect was let off"
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Or, alternately, don't add burglars as facebook friends.
...No where in TFA was Facebook Places mentioned, just idiots who announced that they would not be at home. Looks like the submitter has an axe to grind with Places.
of this app.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
This isn't surprising to me because Facebook and Twitter apps on mobile (iPhone and android) have a "location" feature in them that always really scared me. Basically it posts your position along with your post, and people can track you..
I guess that's not directly related to this particular burglary ring, but it could be used in the same way.. or just to rob people of their phone. "Person A is at the starbucks and they clearly have an iPhone since Facebook says 'posted from my iPhone'.."
i don't understand how the burglars were able to quickly trawl facebook to find :
a) the street addresses of the people who were on holiday, not normally stored in facebook?
b) who did not co-habit with people who were not on holiday
c) who had stuff worth stealing
d) living within easy driving distance of the burglar
e) no alarm, neighborhood watch, alert neighbours etc
f) the exact days of leaving and arriving back
burglars already have lots of ways to find a target house without data mining social networking sites, e.g. pushing flyers half-way into letter boxes then coming back in two days to see if any are still untouched, driving buy in the evening to see if lights are off etc etc.
is it possible that some of those got burgled who had posted about their holiday, and told the police "that must be the reason" ? I know TFA asserts that the police know the gang used facebook, but something does not add up here. seems like BS to me.
Facebook places is only for iPhone and phones that support W3 geolocation, and only available via native application or touch.facebook.com. You also actually have to explicitly 'check in' / 'check out' of places.
.... wait I'm going off topic...
It amazes the ammount of paranoid people turning it off believing it tracks their location whereever they log into face book. It's not even available worldwide completely.
From TFFBFAQ: "At this time, the Places application is available to users in the United States with mobile access to the Facebook application for iPhone or touch.facebook.com"
Even with places turned off, you only need to post "going to fiji for 6 weeks w00t" and everybody knows you're not home. It amazes me the number of people, especially young females who post "I'm home alone tonight and bored" - you can be sure I'm in contact with the really quickly to tell them how dangerous that is and if I they feel unsafe I could
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
But now, thanks to Places and the idiots that use it, burgling is easier than ever!
There is a silver lining to that cloud. The more criminals are tempted to go after those who actively make themselves an easy target, the more likely it is that those with a bit of sense will be left alone. This means you now have more control than ever over whether this will happen to you. Choice is good.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
As I've been saying here on Slashdot for years; the mantra so often chanted here ("security through obscurity is no security at all"), is dead wrong. Security professionals well know that obscurity is a valuable part of their arsenal - because an intruder or attacker cannot prepare in advance for a defensive or security measure he does not know is there.
Actually I don't use it because I understand it. Maybe you don't know this, but you can look before you leap, you can read up on something and learn something about it before deciding whether you will engage in it.
By your false logic, every non-smoker on the planet was once a smoker since they would never know why tobacco use is detrimental to health until after trying it and experiencing worse health. There's this thing called foresight that makes that unnecessary.
Incidentally "trashing" is a very strange term to describe calmly and honestly discussing its disadvantages. I think you have a sore point. Apparently the idea that others might have good reasons for not doing something that you have your reasons for doing is inflammatory and offensive to you. Most of the problems in the world are caused by an inability to live and let live, which in turn is rooted in mentalities like yours. You deserve every last bit of misery it causes you.
Dispute me on that if you think you can, though at this point the prudent thing for you would be to silently disappear and pretend you didn't notice my reply.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think this case could be a very good lever for getting Facebook to change default permissions to "friends only" for everything, as most of the stories are suggesting that, where there's a facebook connection, the profiles were set to the default "everybody can ready my stuff" setting.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up.
What many people seem to fail to see is that every single datapoint one gives out can be combined with others to often paint a far clearer picture of your life and it's details than one might think. It would actually be fairly trivial to put in a few weeks of work in order to build a list of targets ripe for the picking, if that.
Security through obscurity is worthless. I think what you mean is "security WITH obscurity," which is one of the levels of layered security everyone should use.
A friend and I went to a fancy dress party - I was dressed as a firework, my friend as a battery. On the way we were stopped by the police - they let me off, but my friend was charged.
From another source, they didn't use Places at all.
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline." - Frank Zappa