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The case of using the info at a hotel to get your room key is pretty reasonable. On the home break-in story however there's a lot of evidence that this hardly e
by donkeyd 12y ago
The case of using the info at a hotel to get your room key is pretty reasonable. On the home break-in story however there's a lot of evidence that this hardly ever happens if it happens at all. There are plenty analog ways in which criminals scout for homes where the occupants are on vacation. These ways are often much more efficient than their digital counterparts.
I'm not saying this article should be disregarded, however if you're on holiday and you used TripIt's feed on public WiFi, the chance that you're house was broken into because of this is negligible.
- onion2k 12y agoOn the home break-in story however there's a lot of evidence that this hardly ever happens if it happens at all. What evidence would/could there be? Someone sophisticated enough to be wifi sniffing HTTP calls on open networks for details of when people are travelling is unlikely to then just do a straightforward smash and grab burglary. Even just the fact they're bothering with information gathering in the first place points to a criminal who's bit cleverer than your typical housebreaker. I'm not saying you're wrong, just questioning whether there'd be enough data points to suggest one way or the other. It could be a 'common' method of scouting places to burgle among criminals who manage to not get caught.
- riquito 12y agoAn evil organization may build a CAAS (crime as a service, TM since now :-p) and the little burglars may buy a 1.99$ app to know if there is a free house nearby. Mmm, this may work...
- onion2k 12y agoCrime As A Service is essentially what Moriarty does in the Sherlock Holmes novels. Make you wonder if it's ever been done for real...
- FedRegister 12y agoMurder for hire would be CAAS.
- ceejayoz 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing
- brohee 12y agoThe once stealing CC informations are not the one using it usually, the whole "carding" scene is based on CaaS.
- bashinator 12y agoWhat, you mean like this? http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/06/peek-inside-a-professional-carding-shop/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/06/peek-inside-a-professiona...
- smackfu 12y agoIt would only work if you had an untraceable link between the smart people selling the app and the dumb people using the app.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- crazypyro 12y agoBitcoin?
- smackfu 12y agoYes, I would rephrase that as, "there's hardly any evidence that this happens at all." It's almost impossible to tell why a thief robbed a particular empty house unless they are caught and confess.
- ville 12y agoThere was a story few years back about burglars using Facebook status updates to find homes where owners were not home: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/burglars-picked-houses-based-on-facebook-updates/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/burglars-picked-hou... So there is some evidence of using internet for this purpose. Those (supposedly) public Facebook updates are easier to find than TripIt calendars though.
- mikeash 12y agoThe very fact that there's a story about it on nytimes.com is reason to think that it's uncommon. If it was common then it wouldn't be newsworthy. Edit: what's with the downvotes? This is an easy and fairly reliable heuristic: if it shows up on the news, it's not worth worrying about, because newsworthy stuff is rare pretty much by definition.
- UVB-76 12y agoI see what you're getting at, and if a news article is about a particular instance of something occurring, I can see it working. Journalists do also report on emerging and widespread trends, however.
- donkeyd 12y agoThe Dutch police force set-up two teams: - One team of people with experience in scouting houses, who were sent on the road to find targets - One team of IT experts wo were given the assignment to find targets via social media The results were that spotting houses in the more 'traditional' way was about 8 times more effective than through social media. Therefore there's a much bigger chance they spot it with traditional methods, i.e. twig against front door. So you have a much bigger chance of avoiding a break-ins by asking you neighbors to check your front door once a day (if you trust them..), than you do by not using leaky apps. Also, at an airport it's much more effective for a burglar to spot tickets and baggage lables, than it is to sit down and hope that somebody connects to their access point and opens a valuable insecure connection.