In possibly one of the only instances where you might be lucky to have chosen an easily guessed password, a woman stuck for 13 hours after her car flipped over was finally located after a police officer was able to get into her iPad and activate the woman’s Find My iPhone app.
A 28-year-old woman near San Jose spent hours facedown in a ravine after her car fell hundreds of feet down an embankment, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
And while her vehicle’s OnStar system alerted police that she’d been involved in a rollover accident in an are a few miles from her home, cops couldn’t find her car after two hours of searching.
The location the OnStar system had marked wasn’t right, officers realized, after having the system make the car honk repeatedly, to no avail.
From there, police contacted the woman’s cell phone company to get a pin on her location within a 7-mile radius of downtown San Jose, which still didn’t help them find her.
It wasn’t until the woman’s stepmother filed a missing person’s report, saying they lived together and she hadn’t heard from her. A police officer who met with the stepmother asked if the woman had the Find My iPhone app, which she did, on her iPad.
But once the iPad was located, there was still the matter of gaining access to it.
“So I made an educated guess, based on a series of common numbers people use for passwords,” the police officer explained. He’s a SWAT team member and accident reconstruction specialist but also says he’s known around the department as “kind of a tech geek.”
He guessed right, after only three to four tries, officials said, and was able to use the same passcode to unlock the app. Once he activated it, a map of the location where the missing woman’s phone was popped up.
Rescuers found her injured but conscious, face down in a ravine about 500 yards off an embankment. The car was on its roof, and the victim was outside. She only had 12% battery left on her phone by the time she was found.
“You think about it. If we didn’t have that specific location I would hate to think what the outcome would be without him logging into that account,” a captain with the police department said.
She was airlifted to a nearby medical center with major injuries, but is expected to survive.
Find My iPhone app helps save woman in South Bay ravine [San Francisco Chronicle]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment