Break-In!!!!

[vexhold]

So on Thursday, I get home and notice a light on in the basement. I ask the wife if she left one on and she said "No, no one has been down there today, I assumed you left it on". I went down and saw nothing out of place, so dismissed it. Later that night I went out to the garage to get something and found the garage door off the track. I ran back downstairs and found a laptop and 2-3 hard drives missing.

Some A-hole broke into my house!!

But now I am confused...

I understand why someone would pass on stealing the 52" lcd and the servers as they are big and would require a fair amount of time to get loose to take, but why did they take what they took? They passed on AV recievers, Wii systems, motherboards, desktop PC's, Video cards, etc...

And the laptop they took was 1 of 2 in the same location... why just take one?

And there was a stack of 8 hard drives and they only took 2 - 3 (the fact they took the 1TB and the 150GB Raptor and left all the IDe ones makes me think it was a computer literate thief.

So now my question is, I want to step up my security, but dont have alot of cash right now. Does anyone have any advice on what to get for home surviellance systems?

Thanks.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by vexhold

Does anyone have any advice on what to get for home surviellance systems?

A Doberman and a shotgun should do nicely

[vexhold]

I have a Burnese Mountain Dog, and she barks at anyone who comes near our house, but unfortunately, treats shut her up quickly.

And I havent purchased my shotgun yet... my daughters only 7. I thought I had a couple years before I needed it.

[gplasky]

So the key is you don't have a lot of money. There may be deals out there for something like ADT that can get you started in the $99 range but there is usually a monthly charge (last time I had it was $25 and a hard line phone.). Hopefully you can leverage an Internet connection for it now. Most alarm purchases occur after the break-in.

Gerry

[keepersg]

Originally Posted by vexhold

But now I am confused...

I understand why someone would pass on stealing the 52" lcd and the servers as they are big and would require a fair amount of time to get loose to take, but why did they take what they took? They passed on AV recievers, Wii systems, motherboards, desktop PC's, Video cards, etc...

And the laptop they took was 1 of 2 in the same location... why just take one?

And there was a stack of 8 hard drives and they only took 2 - 3 (the fact they took the 1TB and the 150GB Raptor and left all the IDe ones makes me think it was a computer literate thief.

So now my question is, I want to step up my security, but dont have alot of cash right now. Does anyone have any advice on what to get for home surviellance systems?

Thanks.

Identity theft. If you had passwords, bank accounts, SSN or any of that on the stuff that was stolen, you should take steps right away to protect yourself.

[Serra]

Most security systems now will work with just Internet. It is also possible to do it without the monitoring by installing a simple security system and some motion detectors hooked to a siren. Most thieves will not even consider if or not the siren is contacting the police or not, they will just get what they came for and leave. This greatly limits the time they can spend looking around. As an added bonus, if you return home and the siren is blaring, then you'll know that the alarm has been tripped and be more careful.

As for a picky thief, I'd suspect that if the thief left a bunch of stuff that was valuable and only took one of two laptops, then I would consider that the thief was there specifically for a laptop. They don't plan to sell it, but rather are planning to use it. That might mean that they knew it was there and was someone who knew about it because they have been in the house before. (Friend/Worker of some sort)

I think Kaspersky (the Virus scanner people) make a wonderful utility for portable computers that phones home when the computer is activated and connected to the Internet. I think I remember it can even turn on a built in webcam remotely. It would be nice to tell the police what IP your computer is on and hand them a photo of the user!

Originally Posted by keepersg

Identity theft. If you had passwords, bank accounts, SSN or any of that on the stuff that was stolen, you should take steps right away to protect yourself.

That too! People should never use stored passwords in IE/Firefox and they shouldn't keep documents on their PCs that can be used for Identity Thief purposes. One thing that helps with that is Roboform.

[Skirge01]

Two German Shepherds in our house and they don't like visitors. It takes them a while to warm up to family, too, but I'm okay with that. We scared away quite a few trick-or-treaters yesterday... without even opening the door.

They went with what was easy to carry and/or sell. My guess is they were looking for peronal info for identity theft, as well. If you had any financial data, email, or similar on anything which was taken, I'd definitely contact your banks and get a monitoring service set up for your financials.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

They went with what was easy to carry and/or sell. My guess is they were looking for peronal info for identity theft, as well. If you had any financial data, email, or similar on anything which was taken, I'd definitely contact your banks and get a monitoring service set up for your financials.

I'm no expert, but I wonder if you all are giving the dude too much credit. I wonder if a laptop and a couple of HDs were what he could carry easily and perhaps tuck under a coat or something.

I mean that I guess the guy might know that SSNs sometimes exist on a laptop, and that, generally, SATA drives are higher capacity than PATA, but I wonder if those are just the things that caught his eye first?

[vexhold]

I am not too worried about identity theft.

The laptop hasnt been used in a while (last time I used it, I was testing the Windows 7 Beta... there was no other data one it)

The 1TB HD was brand new and there was no data on it

The 150 Raptor was 1 of 2 Raptors I had in a RAID 0 retired gaming setup.

I am not ruling out friends or family at all, in fact I am looking at them first due to bad history.

[paulbeers]

You could always go with something like Nextalarm (it's what I use). They even have a device that can run thru your internet connection. There is a bit of a cost up front (I think its around $250 for the initial kit and $100 if you want to run it thru your broadband connection), but you get a free year of 24-7 monitoring (or at least you did). And then its only $15 a month for monitoring per month after wards (if you pay monthly, usually they run a special of approx $100 if you pay for a whole year at once).

Obviously the savings comes from the fact you do all trouble shooting and installation yourself. This was much cheaper than the $40 a month that most monitoring companies charge and my homeowner's insurance gives me about a 10% discount on my policy because I have 24-7 monitoring which practically pays the $100 yearly monitoring fee.

Just one option though....

[Bizarroterl]

I saw an interview of a professional home burglar once. His recommendation - if you don't want to get robbed - get a dog. It doesn't have to be big or mean, it is the barking that keeps the bad guys away.

[wrems]

For peace of mind especially if you think its friends/family is to set up a web cam to capture motion shots. Then if it happens again you have a pic. It's cheap and easy to setup. There are a bunch of third party utilities for webcam surveillance too, my friend set one up, I'll have to find out what he used and looked into...

[evilpenguin]

I feel your pain, I had my computer stash robbed ~two weeks ago too! I had about 9 shoe box sized containers full of old cables, hard drives, video cards, CPU's, etc. and they all got grabbed. I even have pictures of them doing it



My advice: try not to obsess over it too much.

I spent about a week feeling embarrassed/stupid/angry and losing sleep because I couldn't stop searching craigslist list trying to find someone selling my stuff. Once I calmed down a bit I realized that my stuff was in a padlocked storage locker in a secured underground garage with surveillance cameras and they still got to it. Short of living in a bank vault, there's not much more I could have done.

In the end my only take aways were to take a better inventory of my stuff to make dealing with insurance less painful and to be a bit more mindful that i'm not immune to this kind of thing.

[Skirge01]

Maybe we could get someone to enhance it.

Seriously, that sucks worse than not knowing who did it.

[ccsmoke]

I find it odd the theif was comfortable enough to turn on lights. I would call your banks to report the situation. I would double check the house and garage area again to make sure nothing else is missing. Things that I would check for would be credit card/bank statements missing, unused checks, vehicle registration, Birth Certificates, credit cards, mail etc.

Co-worker had his house broken into and he didn't think anything was missing but sure enough 1 credit card was missing along with some checks. They eventually caught this guy 7 months later but co-workers credit was destoyed and he is having hard time getting it all sorted out. Oddly most banks where the credit card was used/attempted had video of the thief in action from the ATM but wouldn't release that information to the detectives without court order which is why it took so long to catch the guy. The credit card companys did call him whenever the credit card was being attempted.

Monoprice has some camera's that are pretty cheap in addition to wrems recommendation. I would call your insurance agent to see if there is any discount for home security set-up and what qualifies. Some will offer 10-20% discount for having it.

[Zippster]

To me, it sounded unplanned and unorganized which usually means some piss pot kids who got in, then crapped their pants and grabbed a couple things and ran.

Sorry to hear it though as I'm sure you feel pretty violated

[vexhold]

I think I know who did it now. Theres a sober house across the street and theres a younger guy who is into computers. Turns out he was being evicted and had until yesterday to be out. The bad news is he's now long gone, and since hes into comuters, I doubt he will be selling the stuff.

I am now looking into something like this:

http://www.vigilanceandsecurity.com/.../CV301-8CH-002

[Michelo]

Hi,

Take a look at Homeseer. Works nice with SageTV too

[jdamore]

I have a few of the Logitech Wilife cameras and they work perfectly..

[Thomas Wischgol]

I use a few Trendnet IP cameras for that same purpose. I did not find a nice way to integrate it with SageTV yet, though.

Thomas