Office Creepers Stealing Laptops
from the can't-get-away-from-them dept
When I worked at Intel, they had very strict security, such that everyone leaving the building was searched. If you had a laptop, you needed a reason to have it leave the building. It was also not recommended that you bring your own laptop into the building because it was difficult to ever get it back out. Not many companies are so strict. Laptops are valuable and in a world of cubicles where there's no protection, they tend to go missing. Apparently, many laptop thieves are becoming "office creepers". They figure out a way to sneak into an office building, looking just like any other employee. Sometimes they hide away. Sometimes they pretend to work there. At the end of the day, though, they pick up random laptops after everyone has left for the evening and stroll out the door.
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Sometimes it's an insider
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It happened here.
The back door to the building (which couldn't be opened from the outside) was held open with a wooden block so that the smokers could slip in and out. A guy dressed as a package deliver person showed up with a large box and walked in that back door. He did this at lunch time while most people were at lunch and then went cubicle to cubicle loading up laptops and whatever else he wanted until his box was full.
He then walked out the front door of the building, and the receptionist even held the door open for him.
To make matters worse, the PCs were all development PCs that were purchased by the project and didn't go through the standard purchasing procedure so there were no official corporate records of the PCs and they didn't have corporate asset tags attached. When the building manager called corporate security to report the theft of tens of thousands of dollars in equipment, they were powerless to help because as far as they were concerned it wasn't really company property.
The company not only lost the 15+ laptops, but all the development work that was on those PCs but not anywhere else (they weren't official company PCs so they couldn't connect to company the network).
The company's solution to that problem? They removed the wooden block and added a card-key scanner at the back door so smokers can get back in.
The company eventually had a 're-organization' which means they laid off a bunch of unnecessary employees (and for once they actually got it right and only cut the people who really needed to be cut) and brought all the engineers and software developers back into the secure R&D environment on campus.
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Another funny story
One of the guys worked at the Naval Research Labs in D.C. and a friend of his asked him to pick up a game for him using his employee discount and to bring it to work.
The game was (as I recall) Project Haley and was a space travel/trivia game. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem, but the manual was made to look like an official NASA document and every page had "TOP SECRET" printed on it for 'realism'.
Needless to say, it's very difficult to remove documents from a high security military research laboratory, especially those that are marked "TOP SECRET".
Last I heard, the guy was smuggling it out a page at a time in his underwear...
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laptop theft at office.
the morning.
..pat
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I think its mostly the employees...
wandering around the cubes tend to get noticed fairly quickly. So I doubt that "creepers" are as common as depicted. But I do suspect that the employees coworkers are walking off with most of the stuff. Most people can't (or won't) believe that someone they know or work with would rip them off like that.
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Theft again and I have to pay!
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