Why you don't steal from a hacker

**Updated: to quell the comments, I did not choose the title to imply downloading tracking software is hacking, I am a hacker by profession and have been most my life.

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.