Comments on: Phone Home Anti-Robber Mac Security Script

By: SDHC

SDHC — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:20:23 +0000

Sweet ,thanks for sharing .Such a great post.

By: Googleg

Googleg — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:10:04 +0000

Thanks a lot for all this, it’s terrific.

I’ve fixed a few things to have it working on my macBook Pro running OS 10.6.3…

1. As mentioned by someone else, you need to specify the full path of the commands if you intend to run the script via root’s crontab:

/usr/sbin/ioreg

2. The screencapture thing needs to be run in a different way now:

loginwindowpid=`ps auwwx | grep loginwindow |grep -v grep | cut -c12-15`
launchctl bsexec $loginwindowpid /usr/sbin/screencapture -t jpg -x “$path”desktop”$thedate”".jpg”

3. Running the script via the root’s crontab seems to disable the green led revealing the picture being taken, great !

4. You may need to configure your local postfix to have the emails go through (customize $mydomain and $myorigin)

Again, thanks a lot, this is great stuff.

By: uxp

uxp — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:21:14 +0000

Looks like iSightCapture is broken on Snow Leopard. I’m not aware of any alternatives.

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:13:24 +0000

One other thing – is it possible to modify the above to use sendmail instead of mailx? The attachment being sent out to the particular email service (yahoo) is garbled, starting with “Begin 644″

By: Alan Wong

Alan Wong — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:22:20 +0000

I’ve adjusted the script to not check a webserver on a constant basis. Instead, I’ve created a dummy non-passworded user account that isn’t used normally. How would i set cron up to run the script regularly only when this other user is logged in?

By: moidsch

moidsch — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:54:05 +0000

Hi, I tried to follow all the instructions, and everything went smoothly, screenshot and isght cap worked perfectly, the ip was logged as well as serial number. But when I receive the e-mail (using a gmail powered server) it does not come with an attachment. I think it uses the zip as the text and prints it. The result is not usable.

Do you know a way I can correct that?

And congratulations for a very good tip.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:14:59 +0000

@Cam, that is really strange. Email me so I can have a closer look at your script. Please send it as a .txt so it doesn’t get caught in any of my filters.

By: Cam

Cam — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:10:27 +0000

Sorry! That should be line 62, not 64.

By: Cam

Cam — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:40:45 +0000

Okay, I have removed all of the instances of the variable $thedate, but now it keeps telling me

/Users/…/Test/robber.sh: line 64: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `”‘
/Users/…/Test/robber.sh: line 68: syntax error: unexpected end of file

this is what my line 64 looks like

uuencode “$pathtest.zip” “$pathtest.zip” | mailx -s “Robber Logged on $thedate at $extip” cam022408@gmail.com

By: admin

admin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:45:57 +0000

You will need to make sure you have the correct path. Make sure you encompass any spaces with quote marks or don’t have a file path with any spaces.

By: Cam

Cam — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 05:53:42 +0000

Hey, AWESOME post. Thanks so much. I just have a question. The first time I try to run the script terminal comes back with :

… line 37: … Nov 2 13:42:49 HKT 2008.txt: No such file or directory

about 7 times, do you have an explanation or a fix for this?

Thanks much.

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Print Selected Info From Terminal Commands | Mac Tricks And Tips — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:06:40 +0000

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By: admin

admin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:22:35 +0000

Thanks for your comment Mike.

I like the SSH idea, I didn’t think of something like that. Would be quite useful.

Curl. I though about using curl, but I prefer using wget. When I tried it with curl it didn’t have the results I wanted.

Screencapture. That functions works perfectly well for me. I received no problems.

By: Mike H

Mike H — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:19:39 +0000

I’ve done a very similar script (mine’s perl) for my Macbook. I always thought about generalizing it for anyone to use and releasing it for free, but you beat me to it. ;)

Like yours, my script checks in with my external web server to see if it’s stolen. If so, it takes a screenshot and isight grab, and uploads them to my server. In addition, mine will create an ssh connection to that same server (I have shell access there) with a tunnel back into my Macbook. That way I can login to the Macbook itself, regardless of where it is, or whether it’s behind a typical home router.

A couple of minor notes:

- OS X comes with “curl” installed out of the box. curl works very much like wget, so it may be easier to use that in the script rather than downloading wget separately.

- As of the OS X 10.5.4 update, I could no longer run screencapture directly from the script, for the same reason that isightgrab stopped working in one of the Tiger updates: they made it so you can’t run it from ssh or cron. The same AppleScript trick works for both isightgrab and screencapture.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:04:39 +0000

You can. In the cron script simply change */5 to */10 and it will work every ten minutes.

By: darek

darek — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:02:43 +0000

Great,
something like this is provided by Undercover but it’s not free.
I’ll check this scripts.
It would be good, thath script could take pictures in 10minutes interval.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:29:16 +0000

That is weird. From the sounds of it, it is probably due to something wrong with your computers permissions. I hope you get it sorted out.

By: Kresten H. Jacobsen

Kresten H. Jacobsen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:57:00 +0000

Just to finish things off. ioreg and screencapture can be found at
/usr/sbin/
I don’t get any errors now, but I only get a (totally) black screenshot. Wierd.

By: Kresten H. Jacobsen

Kresten H. Jacobsen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:33:54 +0000

The problem persists. Just with different commands. ioreg, screencapture… Testing if there is anything else. If I post too many comments you can jus delete them afterwards.

By: Kresten H. Jacobsen

Kresten H. Jacobsen — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:21:21 +0000

Yeah, I used mailx to identify the problem too. Didn’t get the answer right though.

Thanks for the ultra fast response!