Feel the Wrath – What Happens When You Steal a Hacker’s Computer

‘Zoz’ had his beloved Apple Mac lifted from his apartment dur to some poor physical security.

All the firewalls in the world wont stop a thief walking on to your property and stealing your computer and all your data, a lesson that Dr. Zoz Brookes learned the hard way.

Another hard lesson learned, this time by the thief, was that if you really have to steal a computer don’t steal a hackers computer.

Hailing from Australia, Zoz came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became “Dr. Zoz” after receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science based on research into human-robot communication in the Robotic Life group at MIT’s Media Laboratory.

Here is a talk he gave to an appreciative crowd at DefCon 18, this years Hacking Conference telling the tale of what happened after he discovered his loss.

Note:The actual story starts around the 3:15 mark in the video, so you can skip to that point.

If you want a closer look at the presentation slides shown in the video, you can find them on the DefCon site here as a PDF file.