US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

walrus01

If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.

pushcx

Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

geetee

Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?

londons_explore

And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc? My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer. The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

taf2

I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally

1970-01-01

Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?

stephenlf

Robin Hood?

muragekibicho

Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world. My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.

arjie

[deleted unsubstantiated text]

2b3a51

Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much in a decade or so, or is this some maximalist prosecution claim? RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.

sva_

> One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor Double crime

avadodin

I thought this would be about GPUs. Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime. Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups. If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.