Stolen laptop hack wins BattleHack LA
At Braintree’s BattleHack LA hackathon, the Dropbox category winner — and eventually the grand prize winner — was Droplock, a tool built to help recover stolen laptops. The team behind it, made up of Israel Torres, Ethan Wessel, and Brandon T. Whitney, took home the top spot and will represent Los Angeles at the BattleHack world finals in November, where they’ll compete for a $100,000 USD prize.
How Droplock works
Droplock pairs a laptop agent with a companion website. When a user reports their laptop as stolen via the site, the agent wakes up and starts collecting data from the machine: network information such as the external IP address and wireless network, as well as photos taken through the laptop’s built-in camera. All of this is written directly into the local Dropbox folder, so data collection works even while the laptop is offline. The next time the machine connects to the internet, everything syncs to Dropbox.
The owner can then view the gathered information through the website, which pulls data from Dropbox using the Core API. That gives the owner a way to see the stolen machine’s network details and camera captures, aiding in locating both the laptop and the thief.
Droplock also included a redemption path for the thief. The machine presents an option to either make a donation through JustGiving or pay the owner directly via Braintree, both sponsors of the hackathon. Failure to do so results in the laptop locking down until payment is made. The project is currently OS X-only, but the team plans to expand functionality and add cross-platform support. Development is public on GitHub at https://github.com/3wit/Droplock-BattleHack.
The team behind the hack
Torres and Wessel met as web development interns at Orange Coast College in 2011 and went on to build several iOS and Android apps together. Torres later crossed paths with Whitney at California State University, Long Beach, where the two collaborated on database course projects. As winners of the Dropbox category, each team member received a Mini Jambox and 25GB of free Dropbox storage — a prize that nearly went unclaimed after Whitney tweeted out his redemption code, which fortunately nobody took advantage of before he could.
