Stealing Laptops For Class Credit

First time accepted submitter core_tripper writes "Students at the University of Twente have stolen thirty laptops from various members of the university's staff. They were not prosecuted for this, so they could just get on with their studies. Indeed, these students even received ECTS credits for these thefts. UT researcher Trajce Dimkov asked the students to steal the machines as part of a scientific experiment. Stealing these laptops turned out to be a pretty simple matter."

Comments

Looks like a familiar contest.

[sethstorm]

This sounds like Pwn2Own taken to the next (and otherwise illegal) level. In this case, it looks like they were auditing physical security amongst other things.

Re:Looks like a familiar contest.

[daedae]

Two relevant anecdotes from when I was in college:

1) In an artificial life course we got to propose our own semester project. One guy wanted to write a worm, but the professor was afraid that his tenure would not be enough to protect his job if the worm got out of hand.

2) One faculty member that taught a computer security course used to make the offer that anybody who could successfully access his gradebook and change their grade could have the higher grade. He stopped doing this after students switched from trying to electronically break in to just casing his house.

Re:Security without security?

[Telvin_3d]

From the description, I suspect the notification was more along the lines of "If you catch a student stealing a laptop, see if they are on this list before you call the cops" and not "sure, they can take whatever they want"

Re:Laptops are easy.

[Skyshadow]

I work for a large company, large enough that I see people I don't recognize on our campus every single day.

Two years ago this weekend (Presidents Day, which is a holiday at our office) we had an enterprising thief roll a cart around our office around 5 PM on Friday, loading up laptops. Of course, by then most everyone had skipped out for their long weekend, but if someone was in the office he'd tell them it was for the "weekend virus scanner upgrade", promising people that their machines would be back on Tuesday morning.

I don't know this part for a fact -- our security people and management don't talk about this at all -- but I've heard it enough that I believe it: When someone objected to having their laptop taken, he'd act irritated and ask why they "didn't reply to any of the emails about the upgrade" and then make a show of updating his clipboard -- he'd collect the asset tag from the machine, office number and actually get the person to sign on the line.

I have no idea how many machines he made off with, but it was enough that we all had to suffer new BS security procedures for a year afterword. I would imagine that you could do this at pretty much any big office and get away with it.