This weekend I woke up to a phone call at 6:30 AM from the property management for our building. Apparently our suite had been broken into early Sunday morning (~1AM). Amazingly all that was stolen was one of our Xbox 360s and a Nintendo GameCube. The thieves obviously weren’t too bright since they left all the other equipment (guitars, cameras, flat panel screens and tvs, computers, laptops, etc.).

How did they get in? Well, after attempting to pry open one of our doors unsuccessfully they used a fire extinguisher to bash through the glass in our front door. How they managed to get into the building, how they knew exactly what they wanted (360), etc. is a whole other discussion…

Now here is the interesting part. Our 360 is setup with an Xbox live account so theoretically if that Xbox live account signs in there should be a log file somewhere that would allow us to get an IP address and (again in theory) the ability to get the ISP to give us a physical address. I doubt we’ll actually take the time to do that, but we could and that’s kind of cool (or big brother-ish). With electronics being so connected now I would almost expect to start seeing asset management companies taking advantage of this, e.g. laptop stolen no problem, just wait for someone to plug it into a network.