Man Uses Remote Logon To Help Find Laptop Thief 251
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.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If not reformat completely.
Re:I'm surprised that the thief was so dumb. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:automatic login? (Score:3, Insightful)
So the moral of the story is to not have passwords or you won't get your computer back.
Why not just use the WAN IP? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
They want easy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not all reformats help (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see it survive a Linux LiveCD.
Re:Not all reformats help (Score:3, Insightful)
I always found this hard to believe, someone wanna explain how that would work without custom hardware.Do they assume the bootloader will be left behind?
Re:Not all reformats help (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I don't know precisely how it works, but the bootloader is the only possible way it could survive a repartition. The code is definitely stored on the hard drive, as the FAQ mentions.
Re:Not all reformats help (Score:3, Insightful)
Computrace Agent Hardware & Operating System Requirements:
Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT and the 32-bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Windows Server 2003 and all 32 and 64 bit editions of Windows Vista
Mac OS X version 10.2
Looks like you're right. As to how it works, here's my guess:
Re:Not all reformats help (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not just use the WAN IP? (Score:3, Insightful)
3a and 3b aren't all that difficult. My Macbook Pro was stolen back in April and once I had the IP address, all it took was a 15 minute conversation with the investigating officer, who then got a subpoena to get the address from Comcast. How is driving around to triangulate the signal and narrow it down to a few locations easier than that?
I'm pretty sure if I had gone to the cops with "Here's the house I traced my laptop's radio transmissions to!" instead of "Here's the IP address that he is using, please subpoena Comcast to find out his name and address," they'd have just thought I was some crackpot.