When the laptops bite back
19 August 2008
The criminal fraternity is getting more tech-savvy, pinching laptops and digital cameras, but the good guys are still one step ahead.
Petty crooks, are by definition, a bit thick, or they wouldn’t be in that line of work. The days when a thief used his library card to slide open a locked door, snapping it in two and leaving the part with his name and address inside the building he robbed, seem comically quaint now.
Instead of having a ghost in the machine, today’s consumer items have spying methods to track down the baddies.
There have been some interesting news stories in the US recently, where electronics is biting back at the bad guys. First, there is the story of the online detective, who found a laptop thief by accessing a stolen MacBook remotely to track him down and even photograph him.
The Mercury News reported that Joey Carenza III was able to access a client’s stolen laptop and change passwords on accounts to block access. At the same time, he monitored the thief’s online activity to garner information. The thief used the same mother’s maiden name as passwords to sign up to different sites and entered all sorts of personal details on an online dating site form – dohhh! Although he had a lot of written detail, Carenza wanted more. He activated the laptop’s camera and the felon merrily took lots of pictures of himself, some so clear that his tattoos were legible. Passing on the information about the man who was using the stolen laptop and an IP address helped the police locate the suspect to within 150m. Sure enough, the MacBook, along with a collection of other laptops, desktop PCs, digital cameras, iPods, an iPhone and a police scanner were found in a shed, using an unsecured wireless network. A man was also found in the shed and was charged with possession of stolen goods.
Then there is the tale of digital equipment shopping thieves – do digital cameras and mobile phones sense when they are snatched away from their owners?! No, unromantically, it is technology, and sometimes happy coincidences that ensure justice.
Cameras really are the all-seeing eye. The Eye-Fi is a 2GByte SD memory card for digital cameras that was intended to be a service for all photographers, automatically uploading images to a home computer or online photo sharing service, via a wireless network. No need to faff around with USB cables from camera to computer. It goes one step beyond time and date-stamping images, it can geotag them! It automatically records where you are when you take the picture, so that when the photos are uploaded to a computer, it shows the city and state where the photo was taken. Clicking on a street map or aerial photo pinpoints where the photographer was standing when everyone said “cheese”.
The postage-stamp sized memory card uses WPS or Wi-Fi positioning system for a ‘locate me’ feature, which is also used in the original iPhone. WPS picks up the signals from criss-crossing Wi-Fi signals. There are 70million Wi-Fi basestations in operation, each with beacon signals that can be picked up by a laptop from 1,500m away, although that is not close enough for it to get onto the internet, it is enough for WPS to correlate the signals and their directions to work out its own location. So far, Skyhook has concentrated on North America, but is moving into Europe and Asia to measure Wi-Fi signals ‘leaking’ out of homes, shops and offices to catalogue over 50million hot spots’ longitude and latitude.
In a recent news story, two thieves pinched two cameras from a family on holiday and, of course, took pictures of themselves with their haul. Unfortunately for them, they passed an unsecured network which matched the camera owners’ home network, prompting Eye-Fi to send not just holiday photos but the pictures the criminals took of themselves, back to the owner’s home PC. Busted!
There are other tales of thickos who steal a mobile phone, which they use to send photos and text messages, forgetting that a mobile service provider can automatically back up the data on remote computers, leaving a data and pictorial trail of where the phone, and so therefore, the thief, are.
Some users upload software to PDAs that can be activated to gather information when a new SIM card is installed. This information can then be sent to the rightful owner’s email address. The same software, GadgetTrak, can be used to instruct an Apple computer’s camera to video the thief and send the video to the owner. Talk about you’ve been framed!
So the moral of this week’s WATCaroline is: use secured networks; lock mobile devices’ keypads if possible when not in use, and back-up all data. Although the most important lesson is, if you are going to steal something, make sure you are more intelligent than the goods!
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...