Recovered Laptop

Bokeh

Back in end of June, one of my offices had a laptop stolen. My boss wrote it off as gone, then a few weeks later it showed up on Logmein. Whoever had it, had no idea. Working with the local police, we were able to track roughly the vicinity of the machine.

Last Tuesday we installed a keylogger, which gave us all kinds of information. Once the logs were turned over to the police, they had no trouble further tracking down the individual and recovering the laptop on Sat.

Thank goodness they never wiped the machine. I've since lobbied for LoJack for Laptops since it can be installed in BIOS, but that fell on deaf ears. I get to pick up the machine on Monday.

Anonymouse

Never thought of Logmein as a tool to track down a stolen computer! Glad you got your computer back. If someone is going to be a computer thief then at least know how to cover your tracks. So pretty much someone stole a laptop and just began using it normally as if it was their own? How was the person able to get on? Do you not have to login to your companies computers?

Concerned Water

That's hilarious!

CodeBlox

Not that I would ever do this but I think I would have probably wiped the machine first. If there were some sort of hardware installed for tracking purposes, I'm not so sure then. Nice job anyways!

Bokeh

Just got the machine back. From what the detective told me, the person using it had no idea it was stolen. His "neighbor" asked him if he had good internet connection. He said yes, but has a crappy computer. He allowed this guy to use his new computer in exchange for being allowed to stop by and use it connected to the first guy's internet.

Neither of the users were very savvy, as they had no clue what the other programs were on the computer other than IE and how to get on Facebook.

Yes, their was a login, and the person using the laptop had it under his laptop! You can tell people thousands of times not to do this, but they do it anyhow.

The computer was not wiped. Only thing they did was add a new user (with no password) and for some reason uninstall the anti virus.

So now the cops are after the neighbor who is here on a student visa. They think he might have been told that the computer is gone, and he has skipped town.

Time for Boot&Nuke and reimage.

cyberguypr

Also time to meet with the user and his manager to review security policies.

SteveLord

Defcon 18 Pwned By the owner What happens when you steal a hackers computer zoz part - YouTube 21min. Has some explicit language.

Great video about a hacker who had his laptop stolen and how he "had fun" tracking it down.

Devilsbane

Good use for logmein... didn't the user notice the notification in the top right?

I've heard good and bad for lojack. The good being that you can use it to recover. The bad is that somebody developed a virus that could be used to compromise it at the bios level...