UPDATE: Nicco is now a GadgetTrak customer. After going through the pain of losing his MacBook Air, he wanted to make sure his new one did not suffer the same fate and installed MacTrak on this system.
So I was browsing through Flickr today and I came across this image:
Come to find out this was printed up by Nicco Mele who had his MacBook Air on his chair to get a cup of coffee. He was so angry about being violated like this that he decided to offer a huge reward hoping the thief would reveal himself:
In Washington D.C., the McCain-Palin campaign was going to sell its used office inventory at low prices. A group of reporters showed up to find the only items of value were Blackberry’s for $20 each, most of the batteries were dead and they did not have chargers, however they contained something even more valuable; information. When the staffers brought the devices back to the office and fired them up they found contact numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign along with hundreds of emails from September up to election night. Included were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.
BJs Wholesale Club recently sent a letter out to several of their employees. During a in-house project to update a list and get rid of the use of Social Security numbers and instead use employee ids. However the data was backed up onto a USB flash drive, unencrypted and without theft recovery software on it. Sure enough the drive has gone missing and so letters went out to the employees affected.
It is great that BJs notified their employees immediately and that the goal of the project was to remove Social Security information from their database, however the flash drive should have been encrypted when containing sensitive information as well as had software that could help identify the device’s location if it was stolen, as it could reveal a larger problem of internal data theft.
