Friday, August 12, 2011

Why you don't steal from a hacker





So during the London riots I return home the next morning to find my flat ransacked and my Macbook Pro laptop stolen!
Police showed up, took a report and dusted for prints, performed typical forensics... One thing they did not expect was that I had installed the amazing open source tracking software from http://preyproject.com

Once I flagged my laptop as missing within Prey, I waited eagerly for the first report to come in. I was concerned he wouldn't be able to get past the login password but he was clever enough to add a new account: Here is how to create a new admin account on a Mac

Almost two weary days had gone by and I'm at dinner on a business trip in Luxembourg and I received an email which nearly knocked me out of my chair with excitement.





Next thing I did was buy a pack of smokes and run back to my hotel room so the games could begin... I cranked up the frequency of reports to one in every five minutes to try to get a screen capture of him using gmail or facebook so I could snag a name or login credentials.

After two hours hours of watching him surf religious revelation videos, shopping for Mercedes A class on autotrader he finally popped onto facebook! This was the treasure trove of information, at this point I had the following:

His Name: Sxxxxx Kxxxx
His School: xxxx School Class of 2009
His address: xxx N End Rd London W14
His IP Address: 90.201.72.xx
His ISP: BSKYB
His wireless AP: SKY378xx
His Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=101952xxx

Of course I had pictures of him from the webcam on my Macbook as well as his Facebook page, now I just had to pass the info on to London Metro police and get to bed at a decent hour as I had to run an all-day meeting the following morning!







The tip of the iceberg, now that all the details were collected, London Metro police could make their move!



And the icing on the cake... justice served. Add me on twitter @gregcmartin lets laugh together!


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love how the anonymous idiots come out of the woodwork. Using a monitoring server doesn't make you any less of a hacker. Check out his blog history (years of it) - he's clearly well versed in technology and would be considered a "hacker".

Making a monitoring app is trivial - it's a job of a software developer (which I am), not a hacker. Hacker's can use any OS and any software they wish to aid their efforts. Stop being tards. You're not less of an engineer because you're driving someone else's car.

Charles Feduke said...

Clearly some commenters are upset that their laptops weren't stolen.

stevefrench said...

Do you know how I know you're not a hacker? Because you posted a Facebook screenshot of an iPhone screenshot of an email instead of just posting the email.

Anonymous said...

Yes, let's shout out about how Prey is great everytime someone steals a mac, so that everyone knows about it and is able to avoid it next time.

TLDR: good story bro.

Anonymous said...

I am a hacker and this is my manifesto???

dexter said...

@cazlab: By your standards, can you name one "hacker" through out the history? The closest I get is Woz. But I don't think he buildt his own chips or still uses that computer...

dblagbro said...

EVERYONE who says someone else is or isn't a hacker simply doesn't know what a "hacker" really is.

Good job - too bad there's not more like you.

I can't believe these comments - you would think that calling someone "not a hacker" got you karma, upvotes, or a girlfriend with how many commoners here are doing it.

Ian said...

Good for you and I'm glad you got your Macbook Pro back. I just hope everyone else who got stuff stolen from them in the riots get's it back.

Just out of curiosity do you know what sort of penalty this thief will face?