The Khaki Bandit Strikes At IT - 130 Stolen Laptops

destinyland writes "'The khaki bandit' posed as an office worker at several corporations and successfully stole over 130 laptops which he later sold on eBay. The ease of theft from the corporate offices (including FedEx and Burger King) shows just how bad corporate security can be. In some cases, the career thief just walked into the office behind an employee with a security badge. Two million laptops were stolen just in 2004, and of those 97 percent were never recovered. Ultimately it was the corporate headquarters of Outback Steakhouse who caught the thief with a bugged laptop that notified them when he re-connected it to the internet."

Comments

Re:if he was so smart

[eldavojohn]

why did he not blow away the HDD and reload before putting the thing on the internet? Well, I believe he was doing that, from the article:

Later, at his $1,800-a-month apartment along Miami Beach, the burglar erased the laptops' hard drives and began selling them via services like eBay, where he had earned a 99.4 percent customer-satisfaction rating and tens of thousands of dollars in profit. And then later:

Thanks in part to the company's use of a clever antitheft device... They don't really go into details about it, but this might be something in the NIC chip or something else ingeniously specific to the hardware. They probably don't want to give out details as this was the only way to catch and stop this kind of outfit.

Re:Look at the way many people treat their laptops

[beef curtains]

He did fix the problem in a way that was suitable to him. And he's the guy who uses the laptop and must've been happy with his cheap fix.

In this scenario, it doesn't matter that his solution was "suitable to him", or that "he's the guy who uses the laptop"...the fact of the matter is that he doesn't OWN the laptop, the university does. So basically he borrowed the laptop and broke it to suit his whims. That's generally not acceptable.

If you lent your laptop to a friend, and he brought it back with buttons crudely torn out because they were getting in his way, would you commend him on his clever workaround? Likely not (unless you have very little regard for your valuable belongings).

I'm sure that in whatever field he's a professor in, he probably doesn't make fun of you for not understanding something.

It sounds like the GP understands quite clearly: this professor damaged university property. If I was a student in this professor's class, and decided one day to demolish his overhead projector because it was blocking my view of the whiteboard (assuming professors still use overhead projectors & whiteboards...if not, substitute your own analogy ;) ), would he be wrong to be upset with me? Or would his displeasure merely demonstrate his lack of understanding?

He probably wouldn't even make fun of your poor choice of words with "Gods know".

Ah, the ad hominem attack...I now feel that I might be feeding a troll. Oh well, I've typed too much to delete it all, so I soldier on....

Yours is a problem that many people have. Once you understand something, you can't understand how someone else doesn't understand that problem. Different strokes for different folks.

Once again, I fail to see the GP's "problem"...he's stating that this professor damaged university property. Are either one of us missing something? "Different strokes for different folks" is completely invalid in this situation; the professor's "strokes" violated the ownership rights (and probably the terms of use) of the "folks" who owned the laptop.