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UK rioter steals hacker's laptop, gets outwitted by victim


A rioter in the recent violence in the United Kingdom stole a laptop computer from a house in London, but it was his victim —a hacker— who had the last laugh. Greg Martin, an information security "evangelist," said the suspect took his Apple MacBook Pro during the riots, not knowing he had installed tracking software there. "One thing they did not expect was that I had installed the amazing open source tracking software from http://preyproject.com," Martin said in his blog. He said that while the thief managed to create a new account to use the stolen notebook, the thief did not count on the tracking software to take a screen capture of him. Online snapshots Martin said the software was set up to take screenshots of the thief's online activity while 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!" he said. By logging into Facebook, the thief managed to give Martin his name, school, address, IP address, wireless access point, and even Internet service provider. "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!" Martin said. True enough, the information passed on to London police resulted in the thief's arrest and the recovery of the MacBook. Suspect charged A report on BBC said that the suspect, identified as Soheil Khalilfar, 18, has been charged with handling stolen goods. It also said that Martin was a former employee at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Mr. Martin was staying at his girlfriend's house, because of trouble near his own home, when the Macbook was stolen," the BBC reported. As for Khalilfar, he was out on bail and is to appear before West London Magistrates' Court on Friday. — TJD, GMA News

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