1. 44 www.csoonline.com July 2004
DANIEL ROBINSON LOOKED like just another job
candidate. With his dark gray suit, wingtips, no-nonsense
red tie and neatly trimmed hair, he was so utterly unre-
markable that, when he asked the receptionist if he might
slip into a restricted area of the building to use
the bathroom, she let him in without thinking
twice. Only minutes later, a brand-new lap-
top—and not coincidentally, Robinson—had
vanished.
This story is a made-up one for our purposes,
but the crime is real enough. And even though the 2003
annual CSI/FBI computer crime and security survey
showed a drop in the number of companies reporting
stolen laptops, more than half of respondents in the past
several years reported that they had been victimized.
And the real anecdotes are pervasive: A large insurer
had two of its laptops stolen from a locked car. They
contained data on about 200,000 customers,
who then had to be informed that they were at
risk of identity theft. At a banking giant, a lap-
top containing data on thousands of the bank’s
mortgage customers was stolen from a rental
car’s trunk when two employees traveling
together stopped at a convenience store and left the car
unlocked with the keys in the ignition. In another inci-
dent, the Australian government revealed that over the
ILLUSTRATION BY ANASTASIA VASILAKIS
By Michael Fitzgerald
IN THIS STORY:
Tips for keeping
laptops safe and
data secure
Howto
Thief
a
Laptop
Stop
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