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Sysadmin Steals Almost 20,000 Pieces of Computer Equipment
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Oct 02, 2008 06:57 AM
from the was-that-wrong dept.
from the was-that-wrong dept.
coondoggie writes "Now this is some serious computer theft. We're talking 19,709 pieces of stolen computer equipment from the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. The theft included everything from PCs and printer toner to hard drives, software and other office equipment amounting to over $120,000, according to court documents and published reports."
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Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
So my guess is a few big ticket items, and then lots and lots and LOTS of some small item.
Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
19,700 sheets of paper....
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Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
No, it was just a couple PCs. They're just using the RIAA/CD-R theory to say that, since it was a couple really fast computers, it was the equivalent of thousands of 386's.
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Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
My thoughts exactly. Was this a case of 19,000 pencils and then a few PCs?
Couldn't be, were talking 'military spec' pencils which cost at least $200 each
Parent
More likely ex-military spec (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but I was thinking something similar. Could it be ex-military spec junk hardware?. It could just be junk hardware that's getting thrown out (over a 10 year period), but is not officially signed off as allowed to be taken home as junk. From the paper trail it would look like the junk was still owned. Plus if people leave the organisation who allowed others to take some old junk home, then it would be hard to prove it was given away as rubbish. The paperwork would say it was still owned.
Considering how they are (only) now starting to take security a lot more seriously, I'm wondering if they are making an example of this person, who's basically got a house and/or garage full of junk?. Plus a system admin working for them, would probably get access to a lot of junk old hardware. It could just be old rubbish, but to paranoid non-technical types, who are looking for demons to fear everywhere, they would see it as wrong, rather than just seeing some engineer collecting a lot of interesting looking rubbish, before it hits the rubbish bins.
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Re:More likely ex-military spec (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. And how many of us in IT have a closet full of "junk" that was given to us? Could we show paperwork? Hell no! I know that I am staring at nearly a half a dozen office machines that were given to me because the business thought they wee junk and I talked them out of it. And that don't count the ones I've given to family members,donated to charity,etc.
And with a couple of buddies in the Air Force I can tell you that the military is notorious for replacing things that don't really need replacing so they can spend their budget rather than give it back and possibly get a smaller budget next year. One even put actual theater seats in his home theater because the brass decided to spend some of the budget replacing seats that didn't need replacing.
So while I'm sure that poor bastard is probably screwed(because who is going to remember which officer 10+ years ago told him he could have it?) there is lots of hardware floating around out there "off the books" and just as I'm sure that the accountants for this national chain I did work for a year and a half ago doesn't know that the 733MHZ I run my old DOS games was actually given to me by the local head of the business department then I'm willing to bet a lot of what they are charging this guy with is actually junk he either dumpster dove for or was simply handed.
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Re:More likely ex-military spec (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a phenomenon unique to the military. Any organization of a decent size will use this approach to budget management. Everyone knows how this works, everyone spends tons of cash on random crap at the end of their fiscal year (or what have you), and everyone sees this as inherently detrimental. You are (IMHO) an adult when you finally realize that everyone's a damn idiot. ((you are wise when you include yourself))
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I know for a fact that this is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
All computers and IT equipment (down to mice and thumb drives) are tracked on a company's property book. When the item comes up for life cycle replacement, it is wiped and turned into the Property Book Office. Everything that was ever on a property book has to be turned in this way, regardless of depreciation. A commander can write off a certain amount, but since it is alwa
Re: (Score:3)
Cutting edge military hardware.
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from TFA: private information from 14 employees and contractors who worked at the laboratory from 1998 to 2002 had been found on CDs or zip drives (emphasis mine)
Cutting edge military hardware.
Well those zip drives did have the click of death....
Re:More likely ex-military spec (Score:5, Funny)
There are 1 kinds of people in this world, those who start indexing with 0, and thouse who don't?
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Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
Best way to sneak small things out of work is to (1) sell it on ebay and then (2) mail it while (3) pocketing the money. (Like that guy on MASH who mailed a jeep piece-by-piece.) Nobody examines packages closely.
There's the old joke about the guy who takes a wheel barrow of straw out of the yard every day, the security guard knows he's stealing something and searches it every day, but find only straw! Years later they bump into each other and the guard asks now its too late to do anything about it... what were you stealing? and the guy grins and says 'wheelbarrows'.
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Re:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
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Your Rights Online? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Your Rights Online? (Score:5, Funny)
And then what does it still have to do with YRO, unless he stole it over SSH under the guise of "free (as in computer parts) speech"...
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The investigation widens... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The investigation widens... (Score:5, Funny)
You've seen The Dark Knight then.
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Re:The investigation widens... (Score:5, Funny)
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Old stuff? (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that he did clear out the archive of old and useless equipment. Think about it: 20K of stuff worth 120K in US dollars? That's an average of 6 dollars per item, and you can rest assured that it won't be the minimum that they are quoting. Also, how can you be missing 20K of equipment? Well, easy, since it was probably collecting dust anyway.
But stealing is dangerous stuff, because you will upscale as long as you can get away with it. Once you've started it, it's more difficult to stop, since you've already taken the moral hurdle. And at some time someone is going to miss something, either because of bad luck or because the person taking the stuff is moving upwards.
I've got an old passive AGP Matrox dual head card laying around the office. It would be a perfect fit for one of my older computers. But I won't take it, even though I'm sure it won't be used anymore. That said, the way companies handle old equipment could be considered criminal as well.
Simple solution. Ask (Score:5, Interesting)
The servers were refurbished and donated to a charity as their office servers and the surplus PC has been my desktop for over a year.
If you never ask, the answer will always be no. On the whole, people are nice, if only you are nice to them. Would you deny someone a piece of old equipment if they asked nicely? Then why should someone deny it to you?
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Re:Simple solution. Ask (Score:4, Interesting)
So, sure, asking is the moral and ethical way to do it, but you may just be calling attention to the fact that they haven't thrown any of the old junk that's collecting dust.
I'm not advocating theft, by the way, just pointing out that many companies would rather trash something than give it to an employee. That being said, my boss just gave me an iMac that they were going to get rid of!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Simple solution. Ask (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bad idea to give away excess merchandise to employees though. It can encourage people to intentionally overbuy products simply because they know it will be given to them when it doesn't sell.
A better solution is to have someone box it all up and donate it, assuming it's something worth donating.
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Re:Simple solution. Ask (Score:5, Interesting)
My old manager at my last place of employment was just like this "throw it in the dumpster" - surplus was all to go in the dumpster that was designated for hazardous/electronic waste and go to the scrap yard and be chopped up. Hundreds of monitors, CPU's, Cisco routers, hubs and switches, thousands upon thousands of feet of Cat5 cable, you name it.
However, said manager also told us all "the lid on the dumpster isn't locked and what happens to its contents when I'm gone home is out of my control" *hint hint* - so most of the IT staff, myself included, were pretty careful in stacking things in the dumpster all nice and neat and organized into "waste" and "not waste" - then we'd pick through it after hours for our own take. The next morning we would generally let it slip to the rest of the staff "there's leftover goodies in the dumpster - check it after work tonight".
I'm sure in the end we saved the company many 10's of thousands of $ in disposal fees as I believe we paid close to $0.50/pound for electronics disposal. ($20 for one CRT monitor)
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Re:Simple solution. Ask (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen two examples of disposal that made perfect sense in their environments yet left me so frustrated that it beggars description.
Many years ago at a government agency, where taking something out of the dumpster would get you fired and put in jail, we had a cleanout of old equipment. This was years overdue and there was *lots* of stuff. There had been some sort of foulup with our program to sell off or donate excess equipment, so everything was to go into the scrap dumpster. That dumpster was against an outside wall of the multi-story parking garage. So that no one would be tempted to retrieve anything from the dumpsters (Congress would have our heads on a platter if we gave something to an employee, even by routing through the dumpster), orders were given and all equipment was taken to the third story of the parking garage and dropped into the dumpster from there, smashing everything into uselessness. A gigantic, USD$30K line printer, new and still in the box (although it had been bought nearly a decade before) went over the wall. I nearly cried. I had worked with those printers for a long time and truly loved them for all their loud, clackety goodness and for the fact that they were as reliable as gravity. (Actually, that was why this machine was still in the box; it was bought to serve as a "hot spare" but none of the deployed equipment had ever failed.) The only good thing that came out of it was that I (and others) made so much noise over this waste that procedures were changed and good (or even just repairable) equipment is now given good homes with schools and charities. Nowadays, we have almost no scrap; everything is re-used by someone.
Second example - I had occasion to spend some time at the HQ campus of a major computer manufacturer. They disposed of equipment by putting it on a pallet and dragging it into a hallway. The employees were allowed to take whatever they could carry by themselves. This was a techy crowd, so dead computers got their drives, memory, video cards, etc. pulled. It was like one of those time-lapse shots on the Discovery channel of a swarm of ants disposing of some road kill. Pretty soon, there was just bones. The little left on the pallet was then recycled.
What was frustrating about that? I didn't work there, so I couldn't have any of the goodies. :-)
Parent
So True... (Score:5, Informative)
I am sysadmin in a pharmaceutical company, and the Parent is correct.
We have 3 DELL 2600 servers with Dual CPU Xeon cpu, SCSI raid5, 4GB RAM ready to make their final trip to the dumpster.
We cannot use them anymore for plant systems because they are obsolete and out of support.
They are too big and noisy to use as test systems (as opposed to the 2U 2650s that we are going to keep just for that).
I would love to have even one of those machines in my basement, but it is not going to happen.
Corporate policy forbids employees from taking or even buying obsolete equipment.
In the beginning it was allowed, but someone once abused the system really badly, so now there has to be a documented paper trail for the destruction of all things going the the digital eternity.
We are going to try and give them away to a charity or school because it hurts to see those perfectly good machines except the disks) destroyed. But if we can't find anyone willing to take them, they will be destroyed. :(
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But if we can't find anyone willing to take them, they will be destroyed. :(
What state/country are you in?
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I know a charity who might be interested to buy it and save you form the pain of destroying it.
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http://www.computersforclassrooms.org/ [computersf...srooms.org]
They will even pick it up, if you're in California.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not that simple, at least not for my company.
I have seventeen three old PCs, (PIIIs), sixteen (yes, sixteen) old DLT drives, twelve old G4 macs, seven Apple Cinema Displays with the ADC plugs, two server racks, and two firewire CD drives. This is on top of the boxes of old keyboards, mice, power cables, 10gb and 20gb drives, old software, old UPSs and three palettes of miscellaneous broken and stripped hardware. All of it, every last piece, needs to be accounted for by serial number or count, by mysel
Excuse me ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Mine is the Swingline.
Office Equipment (Score:5, Funny)
wants to be free!
Not much of a sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems pretty lenient considering this is a case of grand theft and potentially identity theft since there was information about contractors. It could also be construed, perhaps, as terrorism or treason considering the organization the equipment and data was stolen from.
Contrast this with penalties for copying music over the internet. Is "Enter Sandman" a more valuable national resource than naval research equipment and data in Washington?
Not unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
His method was to first move equipment around inside the plant, waiting to see if anyone noticed. When the stuff went unnoticed for a period of time (say after an audit), he would load up and drive off base to his home, where the van would be unloaded.
This went on for years and he eventually changed jobs.
It was almost three years later that investigators came to his new home, hundreds of miles away. When they walked up to his door, they could see the open garage that was stuffed to the ceiling with everything from o'scopes to monitors to cameras...on and on and on.
In the end, the company got it all back (he kept and took very good care of everything), and only charged him with theft of one almost worthless item, since that was the only piece they felt like parting with long enough to prosecute. They later told him they were shocked to find him with so much stuff...they said their research told them it would take more than a dozen people to pilfer so much equipment.
Re:Not unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Not unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
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Obviously no toilet seats (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently he didn't get any of those $600 toilet seats or $900 hammers that we used to hear about the military procuring.
They deserve it. Really. Take this as a lesson. (Score:4, Funny)
That's actually a "low" loss. (Score:5, Interesting)
No one is saying that stuff walking away is a good thing, but 19+ thousand items at about $6.00 (est) average per item is typical office flow.
Listen, workers often bring things "into" work that are not counted, and some bring things back. I wouldn't even call it "quid pro quo," I'd call it humans working as humans do. We all do it, nothing bad mind you, I'll burn a DVD of stuff and bring it to work. I'll use my laptop because the company I may be working doesn't want to buy me one if I don't need it.
We are not machines, humans become "part" of the organizations to which they belong, and without malice "communal" supplies and things just get used.
Also, in a large technology environment, there is so much stuff that either gets tossed or walks. Think about keyboards, how many people order a cordless keyboard/mouse for their PCs? Well, what happens to the OEM keyboard/mouse? I'll tell you, it sits in a closet until it gets tossed or walks.
We setup a big data center a number of years back, we ordered 300 Dell servers, each and every damn one came with a keyboard and a mouse. We had a small mountain of brand-new mice and keyboards we didn't know what to do with. Dell would ship without them, and we couldn't get rid of them. So, we left them in a pile, and about 50% walked away.
Then there are hard disks, you upgrade a 100G hard disk to a 250G hard disk, 250g to 500g, what do you do with the old ones? They, too, sit in a closet. They have "book" value but no actual usable value. Computers, jeez, you can't get rid of them, but after 18 months they have "book" value but no practical resale value. It costs more in man-power to dispose of a 2 years old computer than it does to buy a new one. So it sits in a corner or a closet until someone asks "will that be missed?" and the response is "its just taking up space, I know nothing."
Your "human community" will use these things. The books will show a loss, but no real loss has occurred. Bonus! You get to deduct the loss, blame pilfering, and in the end stuff useless to organization stops taking up space and gets used, employees are better off, and there's room in the closets.
This is actually the best way. If they "gave" it to the employees, it would mean paperwork and taxes. This way, its just "lost" so sad. Everyone knows it, everyone does it, and this article is just a CYA piece.
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Hard drives are now $6.00? What did he grab? The MFM lying around? The drum over in the corner?
The average estimated value of each item was $6.09. OK, what is a hard disk worth?
I have 200G ATA hard disk, what is it worth? Seriously, what is it worth? It has two values, the "book" value which you use for accounting and things like insurance, and you have the "functional" value. The functional value is nothing, zip, nada. It was upgraded to a 500G gig. I don't need to 200G hard disk, there no point in putting
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Worst....
Whats the value of 100 32 gig disks?
Now whats the value of the shelf space they are sitting on.
Whats the value of that shelf space over a year? two years? 3 years?
If you are never going to use the drives or sell them, then they are worthless. Worst, they prevent you from using the space you have, which could store things that are going to be used soon, or NEED to be retained.
At worst, taking home 10 or even the whole 100 32 gig disks, makes room for the retiring 250 GB disks as they come out of mac
a big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
The next time some physicist is accused of misplacing (or selling) secret data, just remember this. NRL isn't just some lab somewhere, it's a military lab. While I'm sure this guy didn't want to go selling secrets anywhere, taking old hard drives can lose some scientists their jobs very easily.
News report (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
I hope he wiped those hard drives of any critical information. I wonder if he was working with those guys from MI6 who sold the camera?
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Re:$6.08 per item! (Score:5, Funny)
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Doing it wrong then (Score:5, Insightful)
What you do is make LOTs of 120k loans even if you know they will never be repaid.
Then you get a big bonus etc for doing so well. The bonus could be 120K?
When stuff goes bad, you say "But everyone was doing it too". And everyone else nods their head in agreement.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wou