Recovering a Stolen Laptop... via the Stolen Laptop

It's the kind of story you wouldn't think to make up: the White Plains, New York apartment that Kait Duplaga shared with two others was burgled, with two laptops among the items stolen. Later, an offhand comment from a friend alerted Duplaga to the fact that the thieves had gone online using her Mac laptop. According to the story in yesterday's New York Times, she then used another Mac to remotely access her laptop via the Back to My Mac feature and took a photo of the thief using the stolen computer's built-in iSight camera. That photo led to the arrest of Edmon Shahikian and Ian Frias, and the recovery of most of the stolen property.

The bit with the iSight camera is pretty cool, but what the case really hinged on was the fact that one of Duplaga's roommates recognized the photographed perpetrator as an acquaintance who had been at a party in the apartment weeks earlier. It's like a Law & Order episode -- the bad guys are almost always connected to the victim in some way. So is this a technology story or a crime story?

Well, there is a less obvious, and somewhat ironic tech aspect to the story. While the Times article makes the point that Duplaga works at an Apple store and therefore knew "how to use all [the laptop's] bells and whistles," what isn't mentioned is that Duplaga was only able to pull this off because of her lax approach to security.

In order for Duplaga's clever ploy to work, the thieves had to be able to log in to her laptop. That means she either had weak password protection, or none at all. (When I first read the story I smugly thought that the thieves wouldn't have been able to get past the easy-to-remember-but-impossible-to-crack password on my MacBook -- but then, I'd never have seen it again.) Even amateur security wonks often point out that there is always a tradeoff between security and convenience, and it's hard to find a starker example than this.

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