* Campus laptop thief unmasked thanks to Wi-Fi
Who goes around memorizing their MAC address? Students, apparently. And it’s not a bad idea.
Who goes around memorizing their MAC address? Students, apparently. And it’s not a bad idea.
Joe Marinello, director of IT at Kean University in Union, N.J., recently recounted a story that I just had to pass along.
According to Marinello, a student on campus had his laptop stolen and the university police paid the IT department a visit for help in tracking it down.
Laptop Losers Hall of Shame
As it turns out, the victim knew his MAC address, Marinello recalls in partial disbelief.
Nerdy? Perhaps. Valuable? Definitely!
Between the university’s Cisco RADIUS server and location capabilities in its Trapeze Networks WLAN, the IT department was able to help track down the laptop and the thief.
The group scanned the RADIUS log for the MAC address in question. “There were a number of uses with the legitimate owner’s user ID from times prior to the theft. Then, we suddenly saw the MAC address with other IDs,” Marinello, says, warming to the story.
“After that, the next time we saw that MAC address log on, we went to our Trapeze software and asked it to ‘locate this laptop.’ The software located it accurately to within the room,” he explains.
Campus police obtained a court order, went into the residence hall and retrieved the laptop. “The kid got the laptop back, the thief got arrested, and a trial date was set,” Marinello says. He adds that it turns out that the suspect was also wanted for theft at other schools in New Jersey.
Given that Wi-Fi locationing works in three dimensions, how was the university able to track the location of the device to the right floor?
Marinello says that his group invested a lot of time up front making RF maps using Trapeze’s Ringmaster software, allowing the university to “see a map of all the floors, all APs, floor by floor, building by building to help eliminate some of the between-the-walls” ambiguity.
He recommends not underestimating the time it takes to do this. Though many vendors tout the ability to pull in AutoCAD drawings of the buildings, often the drawings don’t use standard labels and descriptions from document to document. The Wi-Fi vendor’s system will look for all the information coded in a certain way. If the information is presented differently, the system won’t recognize it, which could result in more manual work than expected, he says.
In Kean’s case, however, the university took advantage of a “CAD cleanup” program from Trapeze, a service that standardizes the documents. Then the university built very detailed heat maps using the documents for granular visibility over the environment so that it’s “easy to manage day in, day out,” Marinello says.
