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Sysadmin Steals Almost 20,000 Pieces of Computer Equipment
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Oct 02, 2008 07:57 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
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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:Impressive... most impressive... or not... (Score:5, Funny)
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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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Excuse me ... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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.
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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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: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. :-)
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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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