OT Computer stolen? Here's how to get it back

This was funny and interesting so I thought I would share it.
The nice part starts after a few minutes, so keep on watching.

[url]- YouTube

PS.: Maybe we should have a Off Topic sub forum for these kind of things.

That made my day ;D
I love ZoZ 8)

And that’s why all my computers have RDP/SSH backdoors as well as an OpenVPN daemon.

So you don’t have password protected login on your computers? If you do, then it has to be weak enough to crack. Else I think your system will be wiped and you’re out of luck.
I’ll rather have a locked down system and offsite backup than hope to get as lucky as this guy.

Nope, all my computers have passwords. Data isn’t a concern. All my documents and personal files are on my nas, which I can cut off in a split second. Nas also has a shitload of backdoors and is 3x offsite redundant.

Dos having a ‘shitload of backdoors’ make your system more secure?
And 3x offsite redundant? Is this just your personal data?

3x offsite redundant effects all of my non-application data.

Usually, I have my computers configured in such a way that there are no non-application files stored on them. Of course, there will always be a few personal things like misc small documents and stuff that I don’t care about, but anything important at all is stored on my NAS.

All the data on my workstations (tablet, desktop, netbook, etc) is totally disposable. I could format and reinstall my desktop right now and I won’t lose anything of value, it’s all on my nas, including a few key applications such as Thunderbird portable for email. That complies with my policy because all my emails are stored on the nas with the rest of the email client’s app root, not on the workstation’s hard drive.

The only evidence I even have an email client is in the single network shortcut on my desktop, which I can break easily by…

  • Using a backdoor into the NAS
  • physically pulling ethernet

If someone is going to steal my stuff, there’s not a lot I can do to physically stop them (actually, there is, but I won’t mention that here ;)). The trick is that I have plenty of ways in software to maintain a consistent connection to the computer, or at least make it difficult for the thief to try and get that juicy data.

If someone steals my desktop, they’re hosed. There’s no valuable information on it at all. If someone steal’s my tablet, it’s a brick at the BIOS level until they find me, cut off my finger and use it to swipe, at which point I have much bigger concerns, such as the loss of said finger.

If someone steals my Nas, I can wipe it remotely (or, use a special feature to detect when it’s no longer on my LAN and have it wipe itself) and then it’s just as easy as buying a new one and restoring the data that’s kept on a server located in a very large undisclosed datacenter.

I guess if they really were savvy (most criminals aren’t), they’d just try to wipe the disk, which will work on all my computer minus my tablet. In that case, there’s nothing I can do. The machine is exactly identical to every other computer out there. But my data is still safe, isn’t it?

And yes, there are also plenty of things I’m not mentioning on a public forum. Suffice to say, you would have to be totally stupid to try and take one of my computers.

So the mild mannered computer geek Chris is just a cover-up for the secret agent Chris?

Im only joking with you Chris. You seem to have a good system. A bit on the paranoid side if you ask me, but then again you might have some very valuable data on your system.
Im happy with my WHS setup and my 300Gb of offsite storage over at http://www.keepvault.com/

Actually, not much of this was setup for security in mind.

When I started setting this all up, I decided I wanted to be able to suffer a total disk failure on any one of my workstations without having any data lost.

There was also the issue that because I have 4 different workstations, it started to become difficult to figure out where certain documents were at any one time.

Then there was also the thought that I really wanted to be able to just VPN in and be able to grab files off a central server. All my workstations support WOL and have RDP “backdoors”, but that’s a bandaid, not a fix.

Then, you start adding in a bunch of extra stuff to support other parts of the infrastructure, and sooner or later you end up a lot of little tunnels, backdoors and other potential boobytraps.

Just knowing how my network works, I can easy abuse some of the systems that were originally implemented for totally innocent purposes, like my domain name ip updater scripts.

With regards to disk space, I think at last count I only had roughly 2TB of nas on my lan since so much of it is redundant. Beyond that, I have a production webserver I can store things on offsite, as well as a development server that is also offsite.