I guess it all started with a tweet from Alex Couros back in February.
Just installed Prey – helps you track missing or stolen devices. http:// preyproject.com
I checked out the link he gave and after reading about it I installed Prey on my Macbook Pro then forgot about it.
On Tuesday morning of September 27 someone entered our house through a window and left with my backpack and a number of my wife’s rings. After a couple of hours of changing passwords and login information, slowly realizing how tied I was to this computer, I remembered I had installed Prey. I logged into Prey and marked the computer as missing.
Shortly after this I received an email indicating that I would start receiving reports in 20 minutes. I didn’t receive any reports that day so I assumed that the thief had wiped my computer.
On the afternoon of October third I was in the mac lab setting myself up on on the teacher station when I received an email from the prey project:
Good news Gary!
A new report has arrived for your missing device Gary Bertoia’s MacBook Pro.
You can check it out at:
http://panel.preyproject.com/devices/0jkfeq/reports/22085998
– TIP: To avoid losing reports when reaching your storage limit, you can upgrade to
a Pro account and unlock new features too, such as Prey Active Mode. Take a look at:http://preyproject.com/plans
By the way, it seems your computer is running an old version of Prey. You can
update to the latest by enabling the Remote or Auto Update feature in the Control Panel.Happy hunting
Looks like someone had started using my mac and Prey was actively sending me reports. I went to the control panel read through the options and paid for an upgrade to the Pro version of prey so I could ask for a report on demand.
If you have never seen a Prey report I have added one below. I combined two reports so that the picture taken from my web cam did not clearly show the person who had my computer. This report has a google map and a couple of screenshots. The last screenshot is that of my iPhoto pictures being deleted.
The map was not enough for the Ho Chi Minh police to be able to find my computer so I kept saving the reports and examining the photos and screenshots I was getting.
On October 4 I noticed one of the reports had the name of a university on the bottom left hand side. At that point I did not realize what I was looking at but after I logged in using the id number I saw on the photo and chrome had translated the site to english I realized I had the name of the student, his university ID number, and a photo of him using my computer to log into his University account. We gave this information to the police.
One week later, after archiving 185 reports, 30 photos of the people using my computer, 201 screenshots of the things that were happening on my laptop I went back to the police station and reclaimed my backpack and my mac book pro. Unfortunately my three hard drives (one of them was my backup drive) and my wife’s wedding rings are still missing.
Have been reading a bit more about security and my Mac will have to put that together in a post soon but Prey did work wonders for me.
Note slideshow has some problems so click on the photos only you can navigate through the photos using arrow keys though!
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