Laptop thief arrested as he surfs the net

Melbourne, Aug. 12 -- A teenager who is accused of stealing a laptop and surfing pornography in this Australian city was arrested, thanks to a software that would send an e-mail whenever the laptop was connected to the Internet.

The 18-year-old "thought he was home free after evading police for two months, but he came undone when he logged on to Facebook", The Age reported Wednesday.

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

Branach 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 was quoted as saying.

"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 June 24.

The screenshots allegedly showed the thief browsing for porn videos for the first few weeks.

Towards the end of July, the teenager 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.

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

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Indo-Asian News Service.For more information on news feed please contact Surit Das at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com

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