A man was able to retrieve his possessions from a few armed robbers thanks to his iPhone and his MobileMe account. The victim was not identified by the police. Here’s how it all went down.
Around 1AM near the intersection of Amberson Ave. and Amberson Pl. in Pittsburgh, a man was robbed at gunpoint. The two men asked for his wallet, PIN number for his credit cards, and his iPhone. After taking the man’s possessions, they ran off towards Ellsworth Ave.
Officers arrived at the scene while the man was cancelling his credit cards. And then the victim used Apple’s MobileMe service to determine the location of his iPhone. It turns out his iPhone was tracked down at the Wal-Mart in North Versailles where the police started following the suspects. The suspects purchased items with the stolen credit cards and then moved over to an Eat’n Park restaurant on Route 30.
The suspects were arrested there and had a black pellet gun along with stolen cash, IDs, and credit cards. The three men charged include Bryant Rather (pictured above), Brent Ray Potter, and Myron Knox Jr. They will be charged with two counts of access device fraud, receiving stolen property, possessing instruments of crime, and conspiracy. Rather and Potter are also being charged with robbery.
Apple MobileMe is a way to sync e-mail, contacts, and calendars with applications with different devices. The login details for actress Salma Hayek has been hacked and the information has been leaked to everyone on the 4chan forum. It sounds like that the hacking was a joint effort between between EBaum and Anontalk and then posted on 4chan. Regardless of who did it, the person did got the password with little effort on their part. After he or she logged into Hayek’s account, the anonymous person changed the login details and made this posting:
Her email address is shayek@mac.com
Go to me.com, forgot password, type shayek@mac.com
Her birthday is Sept. 2
Answer to change password question is: frida
The hacker guessed the ID by assuming that most Apple IDs are commonly the first letter of the first name and the whole last name followed by @mac.com. Then the hacker used the Forgot Password feature and found the answer on Hayek’s Wikipedia page which had to do with her birth date. Fortunately for Hayek, there is nothing incriminating in her Mac e-mail account.
This makes me question the whole security question standard that is asked when a password is forgotten is not good enough. Sometimes the questions are too obvious. For example, when David Kernell hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, all he did was guess the security questions. The questions had to do about where Palin went to high school, where she met her husband (the same high school), birth date, and zip code.
