I won't be alarmist, but laptop theft is epidemic.  The big problem for
many is that laptops are more than machines or for us, tools for
independence.  When a laptop is stolen, more is lost than the device.  Our
whole life is on the hard drive.  Backing up data frequently is a
must.  Keep in mind that a laptop can disappear at any time, so be
prepared.  The article below describes the delima faced by many victims of
laptop theft.

kelly




   Thieves Take More Than Laptops

   By Arthur Santana
   Washington Post Staff Writer
   Sunday , November 5, 2000 ; Page A01

   The notes were not on paper. They were in the guts of Leon Herndon's
   laptop, on a disk. The keynote speaker of a medical conference was
   hoping to use Herndon's machine to project the disk data on a screen,
   but with only minutes to speech time, the laptop was . . . where? Not
   at the podium, where Herndon had left it while he made a phone call.

   Swiftly came his dawn of realization: A nimble thief was at work in
   the Washington Convention Center, pilfering not merely an expensive
   computer, which could be replaced easily, but data that couldn't be.
   Along with the speaker's conference notes had vanished a list of
   Herndon's patients back home in North Carolina and their medical
   histories.

   "There was a huge sense of loss," Herndon said of that day this
   summer, adding that the keynote address was delayed two hours as the
   speaker scrambled to replace his lost bytes.

   By the hundreds of thousands, laptop computers are being swiped from
   hotel rooms and the offices of corporate America, a new genre of crime
   that can disrupt lives far more than the theft of a car, a VCR or a
   purse.

   "When we get calls for a claim on a stolen laptop, people are
   frantic," said Brian Haase, a spokesman for an Ohio company that
   insures computers. "This is something that, as a priority in people's
   lives, is in the top one, two or three. Their laptop makes their life
   easier, more productive, and when that's gone, people start to get the
   shakes."

   It's a growing brand of theft that, by one insurance industry
   estimate, will cost the nation $800 million this year--and that's just
   the cost of the computers. Although many victims have backup copies of
   their stolen data--Herndon did for his patient lists--many don't, and
   experts say that nationwide, the lost information might be worth
   several times more than the stolen machines.

   "A laptop could contain tens of millions of dollars' worth of
   information--business plans, a bid for a major contract, a
   pharmaceutical formula, programming codes, your sales database, your
   marketing plan, your initial public offering, all kinds of stuff,"
   said Richard Power, author of "Tangled Web: Tales of Digital Crime
   from the Shadows of Cyberspace."

   Just two weeks ago, D.C. police caught a man as he prepared to walk
   out of a downtown building with five laptops. "They were all stacked
   up, ready to go," said Officer Joseph Adams, a member of a police task
   force formed this summer to fight a surge in thefts from downtown
   offices, laptops being the target of choice by far.

   In an area of downtown, north of the Mall between Second and 17th
   Streets, police recorded 41 stolen laptops from July 1 to Sept. 18. In
   adjacent Foggy Bottom, they have counted about 130 thefts since June
   1.

   A survey of 643 major corporations conducted this year by the FBI and
   the San Francisco-based Computer Security Institute found that 60
   percent of them have suffered laptop thefts, Power said. Overall,
   nearly 320,000 laptops were stolen in the United States last year, up
   from 208,000 in 1995, according to Haase, the spokesman for Safeware,
   the insurance company. And the numbers are expected to increase.

   "Now I'm having to take my laptop with me every time I go home, and
   that's not good," said Elizabeth Woosen, coordinator for government
   and congressional relations at Kuwait Petroleum Corp., which was
   victimized in July when two laptops disappeared from its office on
   Ninth Street NW.

   Laptop thieves appear to want only the computers, not any information
   in them, industry and law enforcement officials said. With laptops so
   popular that people routinely use them at their offices as well as
   when traveling, criminals have no trouble unloading the stolen
   merchandise.

   But for many victims, what hurts more than shelling out several
   thousand dollars for a new computer is coping with the loss of what
   was in their old one, especially if they had not copied data on backup
   discs.

   Debra Coombs, of Sharon, Mass., lost her 15-year-old son's poetry when
   a thief took her $2,000 laptop while she was in town for the same
   medical conference at which Herndon's computer was stolen. But that
   wasn't all: Coombs's laptop was preprogrammed with the passwords of
   restricted Internet sites her husband uses as an engineer.

   "Since it was all automated, all anyone has to do is get on and hit
   the 'enter' button," Coombs said.

   Whoever entered Steven Truxal's office on 13th Street NW over the
   Fourth of July weekend and left with his $3,000 machine took
   confidential company information, not to mention vital e-mail
   messages. Truxal had backed up his data--but not recently. "When it
   happened," Truxal said, "I was like, 'Oh, no. Now what?' "

   Last month, the FBI offered a $25,000 reward for the recovery of a
   laptop stolen in January from the State Department, saying it "may
   have contained highly classified information." The FBI declined to be
   more specific.

   In late 1996, a laptop containing 314,000 credit card account numbers
   was stolen from the offices of Visa International in San Mateo, Calif.
   The company had to scramble to protect its customers, at a cost to the
   company of $6 million.

   In September, an IBM laptop belonging to Irwin Jacobs, chief executive
   of wireless-chip maker Qualcomm Inc., was taken moments after he
   addressed a conference of business writers in California. Jacobs said
   the laptop contained "everything," including financial statements,
   e-mail dating back years and other corporate information.

   Sgt. Don Brister, who works in the high-technology crime unit of the
   San Jose Police Department, said one of the unit's detectives is
   investigating the theft of a laptop that may have billions of dollars'
   worth of information inside.

   The problem of laptop thefts in Silicon Valley is so common, Brister
   said, that companies don't bother to call police for each one. "There
   are some companies that will call in once every few months to report
   all of the laptops stolen all at once," Brister said.

   Many victims of thefts in the Washington area refused to discuss the
   incidents or, like Truxal, asked that their company not be identified,
   either because they are embarrassed or because they do not want to
   advertise how easy the theft was. The incidents often involve what
   D.C. police refer to as a "creeper," someone dressed as a maintenance
   man, a courier or a visiting client. Creepers have been lifting
   wallets, purses and credit cards from unsuspecting office workers for
   decades. And now they're lifting computers.

   "There's a whole contingent of thieves who come downtown to work every
   day, just like you and I come to work. But they come downtown just to
   steal," said D.C. police Lt. James Giovannini. "Some come dressed in a
   three-piece suit, carrying a briefcase, and they walk right in, and
   people won't challenge them."

   Thieves often sneak past building security by walking directly behind
   employees, Giovannini said, and when they are challenged, they say
   that they're looking for a job or a nonexistent person.

   "They go from building to building to building, stealing stuff,"
   Giovannini said. "We've locked them up where they've actually had
   shopping lists in their pockets, model numbers of computer equipment
   and different kinds of things" that would be easy to sell.

   Stolen laptops are almost never recovered, police said, largely
   because their owners don't bother to write down serial numbers. Police
   believe that thieves often pawn the computers, and Adams said the D.C.
   police try to keep tabs on pawn shops in the city, though they have
   yet to find a significant number of stolen laptops.

   "We still check pawn sheets on a regular basis," Adams said. "But you
   don't have to pawn them in the District. You go right across the line
   into Maryland and you have a pawnshop almost on every corner." Or, he
   said, laptops stolen downtown might wind up in more distant parts of
   the country.

   Not that a criminal has to use a pawn shop. "A thief can go in and
   steal a laptop and he could go a half a block down the street and sell
   it," Giovannini said.

   D.C. police attribute their low arrest rate to the elusive nature of
   the thieves, combined with unwitting victims who often cannot
   describe, or never saw, the thief.

   To thwart theft, manufacturers offer laptop bags disguised as ordinary
   luggage and proximity alarms that go off if the laptop gets too far
   away from its user. Data encryption programs shield a laptop's
   contents from unauthorized eyes. But police and insurance groups said
   common sense is the best protection. "Treat your laptop as if it were
   your wallet or your purse," Haase said.

   Truxal said he learned that the hard way.

   "Now we all leave our laptops locked in a drawer," he said, adding
   that he hides his computer bag so as not to tip off would-be burglars
   that there's a laptop in the office. And when he goes to lunch, he
   said, "I lock the door."


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