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Huge Trove of Employee Records Discovered At Abandoned Toys 'R' Us (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Hackaday recently engaged in a bit of urban exploration, taking a look inside of a recently purchased Toys "R" Us location that has been boarded up since the once giant toy store chain folded in June. Inside they found plenty of hardware left behind, from point-of-sale systems to the Cisco networking gear in the server room. But the most interesting find was on paper.
In a back office, they found "several boxes" of personal information about the store's employees, from their medical records to photocopies of their driver's licenses and Social Security cards [and also tax forms]. A video included with the article gives the viewer an impression of just how large a collection of files were left behind.
The author wonders if the situation in this particular store was a fluke, or if the other [800] Toys "R" Us locations were left in a similar state.
The article calls it "a very surprising look at what get's left behind when the money runs out and the employees simply give up...."
"We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating."
In a back office, they found "several boxes" of personal information about the store's employees, from their medical records to photocopies of their driver's licenses and Social Security cards [and also tax forms]. A video included with the article gives the viewer an impression of just how large a collection of files were left behind.
The author wonders if the situation in this particular store was a fluke, or if the other [800] Toys "R" Us locations were left in a similar state.
The article calls it "a very surprising look at what get's left behind when the money runs out and the employees simply give up...."
"We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating."
Reminds me of when we moved to a new office at our university.
The old office used to be a different department and they left behind a cabinet full of documents.
It was full of files of applicants, those who had applied to the department as faculty and students. Each of these files had all the recommendation letters.
I read through a whole bunch of recommendation letters to see how people write them. Most of them were really weird and would not be happy if the applicant read it.
They were not negative but not quite positive either. Just strange mostly.
I couldn't believe that they had just left confidential documents behind. I tried to get them to retrieve the documents but I got no reply. I was quite furious that I had to deal with their cabinets full of their crap and just left it all outside as trash to be picked up. Who knows who read them and what happened to them afterwards.
As someone who was arbitrarily put in charge of "shutting down" a company after they closed their doors, I can attest that there are few guidelines, and few specific instructions.
In my case, I was told to make backups of all the "important stuff" and send it to the parent company. I was also told to contact all lease companies and tell them to come get their shit.
Beyond that, I was given no instructions on what to do with paper documents (shred them?), and nobody seemed to give two shits about what happened to any remaining assets.
I left that company with a new desk and chair for my home office, and a small stockpile of equipment that was off-lease. The rest was left for the landlord of the building to deal with.
The liquidators take liability for disposal, in this case were liquidators appointed, they should be prosecuted for failing to properly dispose of what are by law protected records, especially medical records.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
When a company goes out, it's not rare for customers/employees data to be later found mismanaged.
Like recently, NCIX, a defunct computer hardware store, had a massive databreach due to them essentially leaving their old database servers on location in a place they couldn't pay the rent at, so they essentially gave everything to the landlord... Who sold it to people who made use of that data to make a profit by selling it to China.
This include Social security numbers, past addresses, names and many other information, basically everything you need to steal someone's identity, of their current and past employees. There's even disk images of employees work and home computers in some cases, including compromising pictures, perfect for blackmailing.
Along with credit card numbers, name, addresses, passwords, email, etc.. of customers.
All of it in plain text within the databases that they carelessly left out when they went out.
All this crap should've been shredded in an industrial shredder, instead they literally just gave it away, opening them to serious legal trouble even if they went bankrupt. It's a clear case of complete negligence and wrongdoing.
In my experience, I've always had to clean out old papers and trash when moving a business or business group into a "new" office. Much of that was just moving a group around within the facilities of a large corporation (one of the Dow 30), but, you'd think that would be better because the folks that moved out weren't losing their jobs.
I've actually encountered the same thing with houses. I've done some flipping, and it is remarkable how many people leave almost everything.
One home I rebuilt had been the home of a family with at least two young children. All of the clothes were still there, toys left where they had last been played with, kitchen fully stocked, dishes in the sink, bills in the drawers, all of the normal bathroom stuff in the bathroom, family pictures on the walls and in photo albums, and on and on. In my imagination, I figured they had been in a wreck or something where everyone died. I checked just to satisfy my curiosity and found that they had decided to move to Europe and just abandoned everything they couldn't take with them on the plane.