Ecurb

thanks digininja and the rest for the thoughts, it seems the software does what it's made to do well enough. I'll have to tell her there is nothing we can do. thanks again.

As a rule I try to never talk to the police, it's just not safe. But in some situations it's almost the only choice, sadly. I guess I can add the few extra details I have. Turns out the guy was living at the homeless shelter near by and just found the phone. I guess he thought he could make an extra $100 bucks, really I feel sorry for someone who finds themselves in a situation where they think doing something like that is a good idea. Anyway it's all resolved now. My mother will not have at least a simple password on her smart phone from now on. Thanks all for the words.

update, police met up with the guy, and his family as I understand and gave the phone back. I don't know anymore details right now.

yeah I think the police will likely sit around the parking lot while the theif drives by. But it's my mom, you know shes older and not going challenge these guys by herself of course.

Hi all, This is pretty crazy and I dont have the full story yet but I want to get started on this thread anyway. My mother today told me that she lost her phone, she thought that she left it outside her work and that someone took it. Later in the day someone called her from another phone to her home phone telling her that her sons friend found the phone and that he will sell it for $100. So the guy on the phone said that he could buy it for her and sell it to her. Of course thats BS. She said that she would have to come up with the money and to please call back later. So far no one has called back. The phone was a smart phone with no lock, so of course I guess the person is logging into her facebook account and stuff. I told her to right away to change all passwords quickly. The current plan is if the guy calls back to agree to buy it and then when they meet up bring some friends or maybe even the police. But if they don't call back, what can be done? Of course if it's connecting to the internet then it's gps location should be known, but how would one get it? Any other ideas on how to ID the theif? Will post updates as they come. Bruce

hi all, I work IT, but I don't feel like a "real" IT professional in a way, I do IT project managment. Anway I've been really just learning about IT security for the past few year, mainly just trying to understand things and improve my own security situation. A lot of what I know if from hak5 and readings/sites they've suggested. I'm also into arudio projects and with that I have one project complete and another about 90% finished. I'm orgnially from Florida but have been living and working in europe for the past two years. I'm a pretty regular younger middle age guy, I love freedom, peace and technology. Any further questions feel free to ask, maybe I'll answer :) Bruce

thanks for the replies so far. Well this is the situation. My friend and I work togther in IT and her past employer let her keep her work laptop after leaving but they had to reimage it so that no work data would leave the company. Anyway the image the company put on it had this encryption system that makes you reset the password every so many days. Recently she reset the password and simply can't remember what she set it to. Please forgive im not very knowledgeable on IT security but the way I thought it could work is if you could get some software in before this encryption password screen, maybe via USB, then this cracking software could be configured to guss the password for you. Basically that is what we've been trying to do manually but it would be nice to let a program check all the basic combinations of what we think it could be. Bruce

Hi, A good friend of mine has forgot her password for her whole disk encrypted laptop. The screen says something like "IBM PGP encryption" and it appears right at bootup. She has some ideas on what the password could be, but so far none of them have worked. She is almost sure it is 10 charters long, first six are letters and last four are numbers. Is there anything that can be done? Thanks, Bruce