Proposed MAC Sniffing Dongle Intended To Help Recover Stolen Electronics 120
An anonymous reader writes to say that an Iowa City police officer is developing a new concept to help police find more stolen property. The Gazette has a short report that officer David Schwindt, inspired by a forensics class, is working on L8NT, a specialized wireless dongle to help police officers locate stolen electronics (any of them with wireless capabilities and a MAC address, at least) by scanning for MAC addresses associated with stolen goods. The idea is to have police scan as they drive for these MAC entries, and match them against a database. The article notes a few shortcomings in this concept, but does not point out an even bigger one: MAC addresses are usually mutable, anyhow, in a way that's not as obvious as an obscured serial number, and thieves could refine their business model by automating the change.
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Not sure if you're aware, but white men are killed more often by police than black men, and while the proportion does not match the racial makeup of society it does match the rate of violent crime.
The number is also absurdly low; something like 100-150 black men are shot per year by police, and that does not factor out those shootings which were justified. Given the media's propensity to report every shooting (as it drives a popular narrative), and given that there have only been 3-4 reported unarmed killi
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Heck, if you look at all the recent ones in the news, it is pretty amazing people still have this discussion:
Freddy Grey in Ferguson: He wrestled for control of a policeman's firearm discharging two shots inside the car, tried to run away, was stopped by the policeman, then proceeded to rush a policeman holding a gun on him. This is not the model you want to hold up as police abuse, this is a thug who would have gotten shot if it was a citizen, or a police officer, if he was white black or yellow.
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Wow, totally wrong name there, I feel stupid now :)
Meant to list out Freddy Grey and Michael Brown, but put the wrong name with the one I wrote. Oops.
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Right, that's the exact story the officer, Darren Wilson gave. And indeed, it was corroborated, by his girlfriend who wasn't even there. That's about all we know, because the case was not even allowed to go to trial. These are the kind of fundamental injustices people are upset about.
A forensic examination by the Obama Justice Department, an entity presumably not interested in covering up for a bad cop shooting an innocent black victim, found evidence consistent with Wilson's version of events. You don't have a trial when there's no evidence that a crime occurred.
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Considering that the grand jury had testimony from numerous witnesses, you have to have a pretty slanted view to continue trying to see the events that way.
Should work fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course you can change a MAC address. However, your average 90 IQ bag snatcher can't do that. As with much policing, this is aimed at the low hanging criminal fruit - which is OK, because I imagine petty crime is the majority of crime.
If some master hacker wants to steal your laptop and hide it, they could - however they could just buy their own seeing as how anyone with the skills likely can just get a decent job that is more rewarding that pinching electronics.
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Of course you can change a MAC address. However, your average 90 IQ bag snatcher can't do that. As with much policing, this is aimed at the low hanging criminal fruit - which is OK, because I imagine petty crime is the majority of crime.
And I'll believe that when actual statistics prove it. Until then, consider this another money pit at taxpayer expense.
If some master hacker wants to steal your laptop and hide it, they could - however they could just buy their own seeing as how anyone with the skills likely can just get a decent job that is more rewarding that pinching electronics.
If this were actually true, the world would be devoid of black hat hackers. After all, anyone with the skills...
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Until then, consider this another money pit at taxpayer expense.
Considering you can do all this stuff for free today, with Kismet and/or aircrack-ng stuff, with a cheap USB dongle . . . yes, it is a waste.
Oh, FTF Link:
L8NT's patent pending methodology strips the M.A.C. addresses from packet headers and compares them to the M.A.C. addresses of known stolen devices in its database.
OK, so they want to become a patent troll.
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L8NT's patent pending methodology strips the M.A.C. addresses from packet headers and compares them to the M.A.C. addresses of known stolen devices in its database.
OK, so they want to become a patent troll.
It's a cop doing the patenting. I have no doubt he's excited and proud of his "invention". Let's think about this... Not every mom and pop burglary shop has decent IT staff, and they can get caught with said software. In fact, not every mid-sized business has decent IT staff that can make software like this. Furthermore, chances are the cops also don't have IT staff to make stuff (or use existing stuff) and then easily share it with other publicly funded IT staffs.
Re:Should work fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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Android can't be far behind
I have been doing this on Android for a few years now.
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I fail to see a downside for law enforcement.
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I predict the chances of him actually getting a patent for this approaches zero.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. The patent office has taken the approach that if they issue stupid or bogus patents, the courts will fix it. The courts have taken the attitude that if the patent office issued the patent, it must be good. That's why there have been so many high-profile problems with patent enforcement/infringement for things that are pretty damn obvious; neither entity is willing to assume the responsibility to protect us from predatory BS.
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"patent pending methodology strips the M.A.C. addresses from packet headers and compares them to the M.A.C. addresses of known stolen devices in its database"
Most of this is so obvious to anybody in IT that this should be immediately un-patentable.
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However mac address assignment is mostly random and only needs to be unique to that ip address and internal network. So you can have multiple devices with the same mac address and based upon the violent way law en-FORCE-ment responds, not really OK to start face planting people to the pavement and jumping on the backs and then kidnapping them and throwing them into a cell after sexually molesting them and then with a whoops tee hee and then letting them go. When arrest and the prosecutorial method become a
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Eh? I thought that at least major manufacturers had a MAC range assigned, and carried out their own internal processes between models and individual products to at least give a fighting chance of uniqueness.
From Wikipedia, "The first three octets (in transmission order) identify the organization that issued the identifier and are known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI).[5] The following three (MAC-48 and EUI-48) or five (EUI-64) octets are assign
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Yeah, I was going to go with that but apparently whilst it is fixed as far as the nic hardware is concerned some manufacturers are really slack and reused them and mac spoofing is easy and it appears even sensible. So random without knowing the source of the initial mac address.
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One of the first bits of network troubleshooting I had to do was debugging an address conflict on HP-9800 series machines, which had a dip-switch set equivalent to a MAC on (I've forgotten the name of their networ
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Going out and physically taking a computer is very different than sitting behind a tor network and hacking. There are many black hat hackers who are averse to physical risk.
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Criminals have already learned to power off phones they steal, remove the SIM and not connect it to their wifi until after it's been properly sanitized to get rid of "find my phone" features. Chances are if this happens the people who already do the wiping and unlocking will just add a MAC address randomization step.
Of course the other option is find some nearby MAC addresses, register them to yourself and go and claim your "stolen" property.
Re:Should work fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your average laptop owner doesn't know their device's MAC address.
This should be done with cooperation from device manufacturers.. so the owner just has to pay a nominal fee and have registered their product or know the serial number, "theft reporting key", and model number, and the manufacturer looks up a Device ID and a Key, publishes a "device stolen" record.
Ideally.... i'd like to see them have all devices broadcast an encrypted implant though when doing something else with the wireless. Basical
"There's an app for that!" (Score:2)
It won't work for exactly the same reason. Your average laptop owner doesn't know their device's MAC address.
There's an app for that! (Or easily could be.)
It would be trivial to build an application that would squirrel this info away for the user - like onto a database on various services (paid or free) that he subscribes to or registers for. (A good one would be the registration for the manufacturer's warranty.)
It would also be trivial to include the various device MAC addresses along with the serial num
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Of course you can change a MAC address. However, your average 90 IQ bag snatcher can't do that.
Of course they can. It doesn't take any special skill whatsoever, unless you count searching for, downloading, and installing a program a "special skill".
Warrantless eavesdropping, not stolen goods (Score:3)
This is another Stingray variant, for acquiring information without warrants, and isn't about stolen goods. It just has a better cover story, and a developer who's not insisting on NDAs to cover illegal mobile phone wiretapping because sucking up publicly broadcast information like SSIDs and MACs isn't explicitly illegal.
Your average 90 IQ police department isn't going to search for stolen iPhones even if the user comes to them and says"My phone got stolen, '$Get-My-Phone-Back-App' says it's located at 766
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Can you walk upstairs and ask him to give my phone back?
This isn't how you frame the question. You need to have a little chat with your buddy in the department and buy 'em a beer.
Political connections also help.
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As soon as this becomes a factor in arrests, somebody will sell a tool to do it. This is a stunt, nothing more. It has no lasting positive effects. Well, maybe it can be used fro even more surveillance.
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How many nerds at conferences (Score:3)
Are going to get in trouble because they discussed dongle-sniffing?
In search of probable cause (Score:3)
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Lol - the digital equivalent of tossing a tennis ball at your car to get the drug dog to "hit" on it.
Most thieves are dumb (Score:1)
While it is trivial for a well-informed thief to change their business model by swapping their mac address, you have to remember that most thieves have no idea what a mac address is. Even thieves in the business of stealing iPhones may not read slashdot, shocking as that may be to believe.
Criminals regularly get caught every day because they left fingerprints behind, despite the fact that we've known for something like a century that the cops will try to track you by your fingerprints so you should wear gl
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For every thief that gets their face shown on a camera, there are a lot more who know enough to wear a hoodie.
Even the meth-head looking to snatch a phone knows enough to stuff the device in a pouch made of tinfoil, wait a few days so the device runs out of battery, then takes it apart and parts it out (or sells it to a fence for a rock, and the fence does that.)
Same with bike thieves -- they know frames have serial numbers that are recorded, but the latest Shimano shifting set doesn't, and c
Won't catch the thieves, just the suckers (Score:2)
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Even if they start reliably "catching the suckers" it may reduce the demand for the goods in the first place. The market for stolen phones dropped once the networks started blacklisting them. Sure savvy theives will still export them... or whatever... but getting them to Nigeria to sell them for $50 is beyond the average purse snatcher's level. Simpler to steal something else... like your laptop.
So basically the guys who stole it probably never even turn the thing on.
That laptop probably not. But do you think the laptop the thief actually uses himself to surf for porn was purcha
Just like plate scanners & phone metadata? (Score:3)
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if you gather EVERYTHING all the time.
if you buy from newegg or target or such, they keep records of these things
we have these powerful devices called computers that are really good at remembering things like numbers
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It must be good, it's Patent Pending (Score:2)
Nothing new to see here... (Score:3)
I've been war driving for years using software that collects, among other interesting things, the MAC addresses of every device it hears. Google got in trouble doing this kind of thing too.
This is NOT new, nor should he get a patent on this....
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I've been war driving for years using software that collects, among other interesting things, the MAC addresses of every device it hears. Google got in trouble doing this kind of thing too.
This is NOT new, nor should he get a patent on this....
Exactly. This cutting edge technique could be summed up as "war driving." His magic MAC sniffing dongle might be called a "USB Wifi adapter" and his specialized software could be described as "Kismet."
You can do this cheaply and easily. Get an old laptop, maybe four wifi adapters with external antennas, a gps, and go. Your first three adapters cover channels 1, 6, and 11, and the fourth hops between the remaining channels.
Just no ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is it the idiotic response of law enforcement when confronted with dealing with a small problem always to create a big problem.
So, if the problem is there are a small amount of people who are breaking the law ... we should constantly surveil all people at all times to find that small amount of people.
Yes, there exist people who rob banks. That doesn't mean you stop everybody and fingerprint and interrogate them in case they robbed a bank. If you have no probable cause, you shut the fuck up and don't d
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It's even more stupid than that. What is the government going to do even if they do catch these criminals? They're not going to do any serious time in prison. The prisons are full. These types of criminals are the first to be let out so that they have room to house violent criminals. Then they're back on the street committing the same crimes again. It's not unlike people who get caught committing their 20th DUI. There are no serious punishments, so there's no reason for them to stop even if they do g
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When a police car drives down the street, the officer inside is "surveiling" for stolen cars (with his eyes and a hot sheet). A camera with image recognition that did the same thing would be more effective; but I don't see as it as a problem. How is having a radio receiver that listens for the MAC addresses of known to be stolen devices fundamentally different? Now if the software was to record the location of every MAC address and maintain a database forever that would be different. However, I see no
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When a police car drives down the street, the officer inside is "surveiling" for stolen cars (with his eyes and a hot sheet). A camera with image recognition that did the same thing would be more effective; but I don't see as it as a problem. How is having a radio receiver that listens for the MAC addresses of known to be stolen devices fundamentally different? Now if the software was to record the location of every MAC address and maintain a database forever that would be different. However, I see no indication that is what is being proposed. Sure it is a technically small step to do so; but until they do that I don't see the problem.
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The real intent is probably to build up a database of MAC addresses and their locations at any given time. So later when they're investigating a homicide, they can cross-reference the database, and say "Ah hah, John Doe's phone was at the scene of the crime at the time the blurry surveillance camera video shows someone killing the clerk
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The real intent is probably to build up a database of MAC addresses and their locations at any given time.
with fake mac addresses the whole thing is just a stupid game of collecting useless information that won't be any good to anyone
The problem is actual recovery (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The problem is actual recovery (Score:5, Interesting)
When it happened to me I told the thief's landlord. He retrieved my stuff for me and threw her out in the street.
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Mac sniffing dongle (Score:3)
I met a mac-sniffing dongle once. He finally got his dream job working the Genius Bar.
A database and a map already exists (Score:1)
The community Wi-Fi MAC database is already built.
There's a map done by wardrivers that can be used.
http://noquest.com/network/locating-stolen-ap/
Tutorial change your WLAN mac permanently (easy!) (Score:2)
just buy a mini pci express WLAN card from ebay (cheap cheaper extreme cheap) - hopefully it's not a stolen one!
Replace "mini pci express" card and do what you like with your old card.
And you have a new mac adress.
Bad people could throw these in the garbage or the electronics dumps, or sell them at flea markets, so you should not dumpster dive and flea market for those cheap cards there!
I like the general idea (Score:2)
I used to be a Sprint Wireless customer. They used to, and probably still do blacklist phones, based on ESN of the phone. The ideas was that stolen phones or phones that were not off contract could not be easily sold. The general concept is sound. And I want something like that for my expensive electronics as well.
My fully loaded Macbook Pro cost a little more than $3K. If it gets stolen, I would like to be able to get it back. I understand that police may only recover it from an idiot who bought it f
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Even as much as I disagree with even bricking stolen equipment (it's extremely wasteful in many regards to make perfectly usable equipment unusable), I do understand the sentiment behind why it would be a good thing to do.
However, tracking stolen devices at coffee shops and public Wi-Fi? How could anything possibly go wrong?
Step 1. Give your "enemy" (or whoever) a new iPhone and a $10 Starbucks giftcard.
Step 2. Report device stolen to local police and/or otherwise have it added to the naughty database
Ste
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My fully loaded Macbook Pro cost a little more than $3K. If it gets stolen, I would like to be able to get it back.
Buy a used cheapie for the road and leave the good stuff at home. Dings and dents are your friends, they decrease resale value and maybe the thief will pass over junk that he can't sell.
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My fully loaded Macbook Pro cost a little more than $3K. If it gets stolen, I would like to be able to get it back.
Buy a used cheapie for the road and leave the good stuff at home. Dings and dents are your friends, they decrease resale value and maybe the thief will pass over junk that he can't sell.
THIS! I bought a cheap eePC netbook for road trips, and lately, a Chromebook. My good stuff is safe at home. Now of course, some people want whatever status may come from top-end macs and Sonys, but as much as I like the Apple offerings, I could not care less about wowing people. My only Apple product I take with me is my iPhone, because it would be kind of silly to get a smartphone, then leave it at home.
Like a LPR for electronics (Score:2)
So he wants to build a license plate reader for technocrap. As most gear is set in WiFi whore mode by default, you could build a decent database of "who, where, when" the same way LPRs work. Stick these up on lamposts, or even better at the entrance and exit routes of your town and start building your database. What could go wrong?
SD
BULLSHIT (Score:2)
What the hell do they mean "wireless dongle"? At first I thought they were talking about something that you attach to your devices that you don't want stolen. But that makes no sense at all, as the thieves would quickly learn to remove it. Then, after rereading the disclaimer " (any of them with wireless capabilities and a MAC address, at least) " I think that I realize that the "dongle" is some device that the cops would use to intercept wifi signals. Wouldn't make any sense to add a dongle to a wireles
Sniffing Dongle! (Score:1)
Most thieves are idiots (Score:3)
Sure, some crooks might change the MAC but in many devices a hard reset will return it to the default. But a typical burglar kicks in your door, ransacks the house, grabs anything they think will make them a quick buck for next fix and runs.
I found my camera on Craigslist a couple days after it was stolen in just such a burglary. The cops called him up to "buy" it back and busted him. When I got my camera back it not only had the original configuration settings including my name as the author and copyright holder but also photos of the thief himself taken at the camera store where he tried to sell it.
Finding the manual and learning how to clear configurations and set MAC addresses is simply not in your average crook's play-book.
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The cops called him up to "buy" it back and busted him.
if you read the other stories here you will see that your experience is fairly unique, the cops don't seem to care about petty larceny very much
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This is nothing but the equivalent of scanning the license plate of cars parked on the street.
it's perfectly legal when the scanning is done by human eyes and the information is recorded on paper, so what's wrong with doing it with a machine?
There are cameras all over the roads and the police cars and you can't drive a mile without your license plate being scanned.
The cops have been scanning license plates for decades, in case you haven't been noticing. And now you think it's a problem?
don't carry your bling (Score:2)
keep the good stuff at home, buy cheap junk for going out and about. stop worrying about theft, enjoy life.
Typical Scenario (and why this would not work) (Score:2)
Theft Victim: I would like to report my laptop stolen
Police Officer: Okay, could I have the MAC number of your laptop?
Theft Victim: It’s not a Mac, it’s a PC.
Police Officer: I mean the unique number associated with your network card.
Theft Victim: I don’t have a network card, but would my library card work?
Police Officer: Nevermind.
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this wont work anyway, you have to ask for the "hardware address of the wireless card"
the mac address for the ethernet interface is not going to be very useful here
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this wont work anyway, you have to ask for the "hardware address of the wireless card"
the mac address for the ethernet interface is not going to be very useful here
Theft Victim: Huh?
Legal nightmare (Score:2)
The biggest problem ... (Score:2)
Is that the Police can locate anybody, by reporting his device as stolen.