An 18-year-old Australian accused of stealing a laptop and using it to find pornography has been caught after logging into social networking site Facebook.
The laptop was allegedly stolen from a staff member at a ladder manufacturing company in June. But the company IT support team had already placed software that allows it to control the laptops remotely from any location.
Technical David Stevenson told The Age he was able to set up the laptop to send him an alert whenever it accessed the internet.
“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 said in a phone interview.
“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.”
Stevenson could not identify the alleged thief purely through web-browsing, but was handed a golden opportunity when the teen accessed his Facebook account. Within an hour, the authorities were contacted and an arrest was made.
“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.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
