BrickHouse Security Blog

There are dozens of websites online dedicated to making life difficult for your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend. But for Elaine Cioni that wasn’t enough. When Cioni found out that her already married husband had other girlfriends she went to Yourhackerz.com to help get a better look into his personal life.

For only $100 Yourhackerz.com provided Cioni with the password to her boyfriends AOL account, and then she continued to pay for his wife’s password as well as the password for at least one other girlfriend and even his two children. All of the victims had no idea what was happening. Cioni went even further, making harassing phone calls to her boyfriend and his wife using a “spoofer” service to disguise her voice. Cioni was prosecuted and is now serving a 15 month sentence.

But even though a suspicious girlfriend like Cioni is now behind bars, websites like Yourhackerz.com are still up and running and they present great risks towards computer safety. What is worse is that government officials say that there is not much that they can do about it. With e-mail quickly becoming the easiest way to communicate with people around the world it is scary to know that anyone can pay $100 bucks and hack into your account.  So what can you do to protect yourself? Always make sure your Internet Security software is updated, be wary of downloading attachments from strangers, and restrain yourself from clicking on suspicious links.

(Via The Washington Post)

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Recently in Albany, Georgia, a convenience store was robbed and the entire robbery was caught on tape. The Climax convenience store was robbed at gun point just an hour before its closing time. The thief made off with $300 from the cashier register but left the two employees working there at the time unharmed.

Despite the fact that the entire robbery was caught on tape, the police still have not been able to find the burglar and are asking for any one with information to come forward. The police arrested two men that matched the suspects description, and while both had warrants neither was the person they were looking for. Needless to say some of the workers are still very worried about coming back to work.

“Just to view what happened on the camera made me cry because these are my employees,” said Nicoa West, an employee of Climax who was not on duty during the time of the robbery. [...]

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Poor Vanessa Ward knew something was wrong when she received a letter in the mail welcoming her to Wells Fargo for a credit line that she had been approved of. But there was a problem with that letter - and that was that she had never applied for that line of credit.

Vanessa isn’t sure how the credit card thieves got a hold of her card exactly, she says that it might have happened from a single pick-pocketing. Regardless, Vanessa was already aware that thieves had gone on a shopping spree using her credit. A surveillance video inside of a Safeway store shows the two suspected thieves on a $400 splurge, with purchases that include four prepaid Visa cards and three gift cards to Chili’s and Starbucks cards. Afterwords they spent another $200 at Nordstrom Rack, and later on they also went shopping at Standard TV and Appliance.

Vanessa has already closed all of her accounts and flagged her credit history. But she cant help but be concerned that other victims will fall prey to these thieves.

“I want them to go to jail. I’m sure I’m not the only ID that they have. So if we could put them in jail that would be awesome.”

If you are worried that your personal information may have been compromised, the FTC recommends immediately closing all accounts and changing all passwords. It’s important to contact your banks and credit card providers to alert them of the security breech. You can also place a temporary alert on your credit cards that will put your account activity on high alert, hopefully catching any wrongdoers before they’ve done too much damage.

(Via KGW)

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Someone snuck into a Fort Lauderdale towing company’s parking lot in the dead of night. Someone believed they could be reckless, and that they were above the law when they stole two tow trucks. Someone believed that they would never get caught. What these someone’s didn’t understand was that GPS tracking could and would put an end to their hair-brained schemes.

Fort Lauderdale police arrested two men on Saturday for the theft of the tow trucks. Both were equipped with GPS tracking devices, which had been used to track all movement of the tow trucks during the time they were stolen. A number of stolen items, including car rims, were found in the suspects collection of goods. Police did not immediately identify the men.

Jason Parrett, owner of the Fort Lauderdale repossession truck company First Response Towing and Recovery, said the GPS tracking units were crucial in finding the missing wreckers.

“Without it we wouldn’t have found the trucks,” said Parrett, who has all three trucks in his fleet hooked up with GPS technology.

Parrett said that he was alerted by an employee early Saturday that the trucks were missing and reacted to the situation by pulling up their locations on his wife’s BlackBerry, which is linked to their GPS units to give the company maximum oversight.

After GPS maps showed Ford F-450’s in Oakland Park and the Lauderdale Manors section of the city, Parrett’s drivers were able to find one F-450 abandoned in Oakland Park. When the other was located on Northwest 13th Avenue, the driver observed a man taking the wrecker. The truck was followed by the driver and eventually abandoned when the culprit realized he was being followed.

The GPS system’s activity report was so efficient that it basically did all the police’s work for them, showing where the trucks had been, places where they had been parked for extended periods and how fast they had been driven.This information was used to arrest the culprits on the 1700 block of Northwest 13th Avenue, a location listed in the report.

“The detailed activity reports in these are disgustingly accurate,” Parrett said of the system, which cost him $300 to install and $20 a month for airtime for each of his three trucks.

(Via Miami Herald)

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In Korea, the ashes of famed actress Choi Jin-sil were stolen from their grave by what police believe to be a crazed fan. Police have released video footage taken by the graveyards security cameras which shows a short-haired, medium height man in his 40s wandered around the grave at 5:43-5:55AM on August 2nd. He was wearing camouflage pants, a short sleeved T-shirt and a gray vest.

The suspect was holding a large wooden stick and was seen in the video wandering around the grave occasionally measuring the grave where the ashes of the actress where held. After about 10 minutes of doing so, he left the scene, and that is when cameras were able to catch still images of his face. Police have already managed to match his face to another video of a man breaking into the grave with a hammer four nights later and stealing the ashes of the late Choi Jin-sil. [...]

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Ian Stafford, Former Mayor of Preesall

Female residents in Preesall, Lancashire were becoming anxious of a ladies underwear thief and were surprised to find that the lead suspect was actually the mayor of the town. Local women had begun to call police after they noticed that multiple articles of clothing began disappearing from their homes. One woman in particular was so nervous about the ongoing perverted thefts, that she installed a hidden camcorder into her home.

The video she recorded was of a half naked man breaking into her house stealing her underwear, putting them on, and then performing lewd sexual acts with them. Upon further investigation police were able to determine that the underwear thief was none other than the local Mayor Ian Stanford.  Stanford had been an independent member of the town council for years and was only recently elected as the mayor for a second term. [...]

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Lets be honest: It seems like the interesting robbers are all gone. The Ocean’s 11 style thieves are a relic of the past. You never hear about people putting effort into robberies or heists, no grand getaways, and it’s a shame. At least two men brought back that memorable past with a London jewelry heist worth $65 million last week, but in doing so they confronted a powerful modern foe: video surveillance.

This dangerous daytime heist netted the robbers $65 million worth of jewelry from the powerful London diamond merchant Graff Diamonds, but also led to a suspect being arrested in connection with the heist and the entire heist being captured on camera. The surveillance footage seemed to capture a scene similar to every heist movie in history, with the two dapper robbers producing guns in the store and taking a staff member hostage while making off with their haul, before escaping into a group of getaway cars across the city. It was a fascinating scene that was filmed that day. Too bad for them, our Dapper Dons weren’t starring in Hollywood movie, but stuck in real life. [...]

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Turtles have a rough life. The last thing they need to worry about is some crazy idiot interrupting their well-earned peace and quiet and sticking them down their pants. For one poor turtle in Spring, Texas, being stuck down someone’s pants was more than just some crazy nightmare. Instead it became a strange, strange reality. Good thing there were surveillance cameras there to witness the scene.

On Wednesday, August 12, a thief targeting a pet store in Spring posed as a customer and searched the store before using a piece of metal to pry open one of the store cabinets, from where he then removed the fist-sized Indian Star Tortoise and shoved it into the left pocket of his jeans. He lucked out in not grabbing a snapping turtle. That would have been uncomfortable.

“We’ve been here twenty years and I’ve never had a customer shove a turtle in his pants,” said Sherry Stack, Pet City owner.

[...]

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Beer-chucking Chicago Cubs fan Johnny Macchione is now guilty of two misdemeanors after dousing Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Shane Victorino with a cold Bud Light. However, Macchione is even more guilty of being a coward after making an acquaintance originally take the fall for him.

The Bartlett native turned himself into police on Thursday after he couldn’t run away from the large collections of videos plastered all over the Internet identifying him as the despicable culprit.

“It was a big mistake. I’d like to apologize to Shane Victorino,” said the 21-year-old, who described himself as a lifelong Cubs fan. “It really is nothing against him. It was a mistake like I said.” [...]

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Superheros are a thing of the past- with cutting edge technology, you can become your own vigilante. After a series of approximately 30 break-ins in a period of only 2 weeks, a criminal was caught on a home video tape by a local resident, Pam Trickey. The sunlit, warm, and welcoming town turned into a much darker reality- one that she wanted to catch on tape. Authorities are hopeful that this new footage will help them catch the burglar. The picture identification is a vital part of the investigation that was missing prior to this major breakthrough. Trickey, bought surveillance cameras to catch the person who vandalized her car, instead she got the burglar responsible for other neighborhood car break-ins. Taking it a step further, she cleverly hid the cameras in flower pots.

“There he is right there, and he walks up to the vehicle, you can see his face right there he is looking at the camera,” Trickey said.

Watching the man rummage through her car, looking for anything valuable, Trickey was relieved when the man finally left, defeated by her invaluable objects. On the same night her car was ransacked so too her a number of her neighbors- but Trickey is hopeful that her home movie will help catch the thief. [...]

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Busted stories like the follow one are always amusing, but it really makes you wonder about the audacity of some thieves out there. Recently, a thief stole a camera and lens from a special exhibit at the Multnomah County’s Central Library. The exhibit featured a display full of police crime-fighting tools. The thief immediately went for a Nikon camera and lens which ironically was located next to a book titled “Crime Scene Photography”, an old fingerprint magnifying glass, a plastic police evidence bag, and bright yellow evidence markers.  A surveillance camera in the library caught the whole thing, and another surveillance camera even caught the thief holding the camera in the elevator as he exited the library. [...]

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Thou shall not kill, Honor thy father and thy mother, thou shall not steal. We all know the 10 commandments, but at what lengths will some go to avoid having to hear them again?

Ask the 7 year old boy from Utah who wanted to leave church so badly that he drove his dad’s car home. Mid-drive he ran a stop sign, almost hit another driver and managed to escape a chase by the police. Upon arrival he ran inside his house and hid, realizing that he had just broken 2 out of the 10 commandments.

When his father asked him what had happened, the boy admitted to just wanting to go on a joyride.

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An Atlanta FBI task force has arrested a man suspected in at least three bank robberies in metro Atlanta. David Conn, 30, was arrested on July 14 in Decateur by the FBI-led Atlanta Metropolitan Major Offenders unit, based on investigations by Sandy Springs and Atlanta police. Conn was arrested for a July 1 robbery of a Wachovia bank in North Fulton, the June 25 attempted robbery of a Bank of America in Sandy Springs, and the June 10 robbery of a Wachovia in Atlanta, Sandy Springs spokesman Lt. Steve Rose said.

Sandy Springs and AMMO officers were able to track Conn by a note he used to rob one of the banks which he left at the scene. The note said he had placed a bomb in the building and was demanding money, and when Conn fled, he left the note behind. Because the note had been written on a loan-for-title document from Title Max, investigators were able to form a list of potential subjects through the company, and then were able to identify Conn himself by comparing bank surveillance photos with those of the potential subjects. [...]

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It’s always amusing when a story comes across the wire where a thief is foiled by his own doing during a crime attempt. One such incident happened recently in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a 41 year old woman tried to hold up a man using a plastic gun. The victim, who was sitting in his car, was approached by the woman and told to hand over his money. When he responded by saying that he didn’t have any on him, the woman proceeded to hit her plastic gun on his head, which caused it to break in to pieces. That caused the man to realize that the gun was fake, so he proceeded to chase after her and even managed to grab the “gun” away from her. The woman was eventually taken in by police for aggravated robbery.

Later, she told a police officer “I guess I shoulda’ thought this through more” and “I’m just getting what I deserve.”

(Via Deseret News)

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