WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A Westchester woman who had her laptop stolen was able to connect to the computer, photograph two suspects and file the photos to police.
Using technology similar to GadgetTrak Verey white Plains Police say they used the photos to arrest 23-year-old Edmon Shahikian of Katonah and 20-year-old Ian Frias of the Bronx Wednesday night. Police say they recovered most of the $5,000 worth of electronics stolen from the woman’s White Plains apartment back on April 27.
Police say the woman got a call from a friend asking if she was online.
The victim said no and was told by the friend that her computer showed her as being on the Internet.
At that point the victim signed onto another computer and used the “Back to My Mac” program to determine that her stolen MacIntosh laptop was on the Web.
She then used the stolen computer’s camera to photograph Shahikian.
A Mexican press attache was caught on camera placing several BlackBerry devices into his pocket during a press event in New Orleans. Due to heightened security, all officials were required to place their cell phones on a table before entering the meeting room. While the meeting was underway, Rafael Quintero Curiel, who was serving as Mexico’s lead press advance, slipped outside and began pocketing the handsets. Whoops. When the meeting was over, several attendees noticed that their ‘Berrys had gone missing, and alerted the secret service. Curiel had already began driving to the airport when the Secret Service ordered him back to the press area. When confronted with the tapes, Curiel “said it was purely accidental, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left New Orleans with the Mexican delegation.” Uh, ‘kay? No word on whether the US plans to pursue legal action. On another note, why exactly are White House staffers placing their BlackBerrys unattended in an easily accessed area as a matter of “common practice”?
GadgetTrak has recovered another iPod for a subscriber this month with another pending. Mario Xavier in Oregon lost his iPod and had it recovered using the GadgetTrak service last week. Mario was quite surprised when we called him and told him we knew the whereabouts of his iPod. Within 24 hours Mario had his iPod back in his hands and we received an email from him a few days ago “I just wanted to let you all know how glad I am regarding your service. I just got my iPod back and it’s all due to GadgetTrak. Thanks again!”.
We also have another iPod recovery still in progress, connection data was sent to us after an iPod was stolen in a middle school, a police report has been filed with the GadgetTrak data collected. We were able to provide detailed information regarding the whereabouts of the device and who had it, the school administrators and police are investigating further.
Since GadgetTrak launched its patent-pending system for recovering portable electronics last March, we have been happy to report several recoveries for our subscribers. The recoveries that we are able to report on the site are published with the permission of our subscribers, there have been quite a few others in the past few months and not just iPods.
Over the past year we have also made vast improvements to our GadgetTrak USB software including the ability to get around common firewalls and additional measures to avoid detection on multiple operating systems. We have also greatly improved our technology to protect our subscribers privacy, such as strong encryption of data sent between the host system and our server. GadgetTrak now has two patents filed for our theft recovery solutions with more innovative solutions on the way. GadgetTrak USB is also now being bundled with Seagate/Maxtor external hard drives, providing additional protection for their consumers.
Peter Gabriel’s online music empire is reduced to a holding page, following the theft of servers from his web host over the weekend.
According to the web monitoring firm Netcraft, Gabriel’s servers are hosted by Rednet Ltd, although that appears to be a defunct brand of a UK company called Opal Telecom, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Carphone Warehouse.
But details are sketchy and as it’s a public holiday in the UK, we’ll fill in the gaps tomorrow.
In the meantime here is the message posted at time of writing on the web-savvy musician’s site, PeterGabriel.com.
Some companies are now producing software for theft protection that can track the whereabouts of units, and some manufacturers are requiring that codes be entered before the system can be activated.
“If someone steals your GPS device, they’ve stolen more than just your device,” said Ken Westin, chief executive officer of GadgetTrak, in Portland, Ore. “It has your home address and where you’ve been for the past week.”
There was a recent post on Slashdot this past weekend which listed GadgetTrak along side a few other companies that develop theft recovery software. I am a huge Slashdot fan, mainly because the readers/commenters do not pull any punches, they are geeks geeks, meaning they know technology. One key difference between GadgetTrak and these other solutions became quite apparent in the comments, as many security and IT folks in the know understand the security ramifications of the “traditional approach” to theft recovery, whereby a back-door is essentially installed into the system. The comments regarding one solution backs up why we feel this approach should be avoided:
What I find is interesting: A program that installs without my permission or knowledge, takes orders from a 3rd party (up to and including “wipe the hard drive”), and actively resists removal. The sales rep at MPC/Gateway got the XXXXX rep on the phone and they both claim that it isn’t a virus. Okay, fine, it doesn’t self-replicate. Seems to fit darn near every other part of the definition! Their tech-support guy ordered the two computers to disable their BIOS component and uninstall [remotely], which THEY DID! The files in C:\Windows\System32 vanished before my eyes.
Gateway/MPC doesn’t seem to understand my frustration. We spend so much time and money securing our computers and making sure they run only the software we WANT them to run. Now you want me to feel safe with a BIOS-level program that copies itself to FAT32/NTFS partitions and tricks Windows OSes into executing it? This same program that calls a 3rd party and requests instructions? I know of only three instructions it can accept, but what if there are others? (”Stolen, check in every 15 minutes”, “Stolen, wipe hard drive”, “Disable and uninstall” we know of)
We are excited to announce that GadgetTrak is a proud sponsor of this years Oregon Trail Rally. Expected entrants include defending Rally America champion and extreme sport icon Travis Pastrana, DC shoes founder Ken Block, BMX legend Dave Mirra, Formula D champion Tanner Foust, and some of the fastest rally drivers and co-drivers in North America. GadgetTrak will have a booth at the fan event at Pioneer Square in Portland Oregon on the 16th as well as at Portland International Raceway for the first stage of the rally.
A gun and stolen iPods and cell phones were found Thursday in the locker of an Orange County high school student, school officials said.The West Orange High School student, who has not been identified, will receive a mandatory 10-day suspension and expulsion, school officials said.
This goes to show you that in some cases when stolen gadgets are stolen, it is not just the stolen device that is returned, but larger crimes and other stolen property can be discovered.
