August 18th, 2009

An 18-year-old, accused of stealing a laptop in Melbourne and surfing porn on it, thought he was home free after evading police for two months, but he came undone when he logged on to Facebook.

The laptop was reportedly stolen from a staff member of ladder manufacturer Branach in the vicinity of Narre Warren, in Melbourne’s south-east, on June 8.

Fortunately for Branach, the company is a client of Sydney-based managed IT support firm Navigatum, which can connect to and control any of Branach’s laptops and diagnose technical problems from anywhere.

Using remote access software called Kaseya, Navigatum senior network technician David Stevenson set up an alert so that, whenever the stolen laptop was used to log in to the internet, the software would send him an email.

“I can tell when he’s online and from there I can jump on to my laptop and start watching what he’s doing,” Stevenson said in a phone interview.

“We were watching him for a little while but, because he was logging on at really random times like really late at night, we set up some scripts to capture [screenshots of] what he was doing on the screen every 30 seconds, and that was then uploaded to our server.”

On top of that, Stevenson installed a keylogger on the laptop “so we were able to log all of his keystrokes and passwords and websites that he visited”.

Stevenson said it was a few weeks before the user first began browsing the web with the laptop on June 24.

The screenshots, seen by this reporter, allegedly showed the thief browsing for porn videos for the first few weeks. He allegedly sourced the racy clips by conducting Google searches for terms such as “porn” and “porn videos”.

But Stevenson knew that, if he bided his time, the user would slip up eventually. It wasn’t possible to identify him immediately because the stolen laptop did not have a webcam.

Towards the end of July, the teen logged in to his Facebook account and, within an hour, he was arrested and charged with the theft, Stevenson said.

“From his Facebook account we managed to get his date of birth and school that he went to, and from there we were able to track him down,” Stevenson said.

This reporter saw the screenshots of the Facebook account but these, along with the alleged thief’s name, cannot be revealed for legal reasons.

Victoria Police confirmed the incident and said the teen was charged with theft but had yet to face court.

Stevenson said the police told him that, thanks in large part to his detective work, they were able to get the alleged thief to admit to a string of car thefts in the area. He also dobbed in two of his accomplices, Stevenson said.

“They [police] weren’t impressed with the amount of paper work they had to fill out so I’d say they managed to retrieve quite a lot,” he said.

Stevenson’s high-tech vigilante detective work is one of the first cases of geek justice found in Australia but it follows a string of similar cases overseas.

See the full post.

Pathway Solutions is now using Kaseya for our network managment for clients.  We have been able to speed up response time and keep up with backups, updates, and trouble tickets much faster since we initiated this.

Find out more by visiting us at http://www.itpws.com

Scott Kintz

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