caffineehacker

Thank you for the one constructive post on this thread. I'll have her give that a try since she does have friends with macs and I know a gui will make things a bit easier. It looks like that wifi adapter uses the RTL8187 chipset which kismac says is "in progress towards full support." Do you have experience with this working? Thanks again for the good advice, Tim

That's where the police got the address from. They went to the house that the IP address belonged to but it was an older couple with no kids and the detective stopped investigating there. My sister went to the area and discovered the open access point and saw her computer on the network. I'm not trying to scam anyone, not even sure where a story like this would become a scam. I just want to help her get her laptop back. Instead of questioning the story, can we put our brains together and form something fool proof for tracking what would be a rouge device on an open access point? She's not tech savvy and I haven't done this before so it is very difficult for me to help her. I could probably do it myself if I were there, but that's not possible right now. Can someone at least recommend a good cheap usb wifi adapter that a directional antenna can be hooked up to. The wifi adapter also needs to work in promiscuous mode for sniffing packets/wifi networks. Are cantennas (made from pringle cans) directional or omni-directional? Thanks, Tim

Well they were dumb enough to log in to my sister's GMail from their house so we have the IP address of the access point they were using. They also bought two songs on my sister's iTunes. With that we know they are in one of 3 or 4 houses, we just need to somehow use a directional antenna and a packet sniffer to pick up exactly which house. That last part is what we need help with.

The neighborhood is quite nice. I actually told my sister the easiest thing would be to knock on the neighbor's doors with some of her guy friends and greet the person with "So I hear you have a stolen laptop?" if they sh*t their pants then they stolen, if they're legitimately confused then it's one of the other neighbors. The police won't do anything because they don't know what house it's in. The detective my sister talked to thought using a directional antennae was a great idea but that the police just didn't have the ability to do it themselves. If there isn't anyone who could actually help her, is there a simple step-by-step way with the required hardware for her to track a computer on a wifi network. She has admin access to the router (it's just a simple linksys router with default ESSID and default password). Short of a packet sniffer and a compatible wifi card I don't know how to track it and given that I have not done this before I was hoping someone with more expertise could help.

Background: My sister's laptop was stolen out of her car. The idiots then logged on to her Gmail (she didn't have a password to log in to her machine) so she got their IP address. The police gave my sister the address for the IP address but it's an open access point being used by the thieves. The police gave my sister strict instructions not to knock on doors or in any other way interfere outside of tracking down, from the street, which house her computer is in. I gave her moocherhunter and some basic instructions but having never done this myself I am limited in how much I can help her. My request: I live in Washington State and she lives in Rhode Island meaning that I can't really go help her. Would anyone that lives in Rhode Island feel like being a good White Hat hacker and help her track the house her laptop is in? As a bonus, the police said they will arrive within 10 minutes of when she finds the right house and you can watch them arrests the idiots. Thanks in advance for any help offered, the police are pretty much useless beyond getting the street address the IP address is from.