Forwarded from: Times Enemy <times@private> greetings. It's a rather dull story, but there is one paragraph which is rather interesting, for those paranoid freaks in the crowd. Namely: "Investigators traced the computer to Krastof when he logged onto his America Online account at home through one of the stolen computers, White said. That enabled authorities to connect the computer's Internet Protocol address, a number that identifies a computer on the Internet, to Krastof's home address through his AOL account, White said." Think about that please, for a moment. The only non-paranoid thoughts i can have is the computer had some sort of software on it which pulled an E.T. call home manuever, or acted as a beacon. Perhaps a vpn application fired up on startup, or maybe the e-mail client auto-started and tried logging in. Other than a few variations of this though, all i can think of is AOL has some sort of method for identifying each software installation. It could be as simple as a cookie, sure, but even that is perhaps ... icky. Let me just tell ya, yeah yeah, it's wrong, but if ya steal a computer, don't connect it to a public network until it's been santized, and even then...! *sigh* Schmuck deserved to get caught. ciao .te > http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-5112193.html > > November 27, 2003 > By Reuters > > Police have arrested a California man in connection with a burglary in > which a computer with sensitive information about Wells Fargo > customers was stolen, officials said Wednesday. > > Edward Jonathan Krastof, 38, was arrested at his home late on Tuesday > in Concord, Calif., the same town where the computer was stolen > earlier this month, said Concord Police Sergeant Steve White. > > Krastof, who works at Home Depot, confessed to stealing the computer, > as well as another computer and a laptop, after breaking into the > office of an analyst for Wells Fargo, White said. > > Police recovered the equipment at Krastof's home, along with equipment > used for scanning identity cards and checks, he said. > > "He is a low-level ID theft kind of guy," White said of Krastof. [...] - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo@private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Dec 01 2003 - 04:14:28 PST