Thursday, September 04, 2003

OH MY GOODNESS!
On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport.
The men, described as being of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance, took a lift to the third floor of the Charles Ulm building in Link Road, next to the customs handling depot and the Qantas Jet Base.
They presented themselves to the security desk as technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the outsourced customs computer services provider which regularly sends people to work on computers after normal office hours.
After supplying false names and signatures, they were given access to the top-security mainframe room. They knew the room's location and no directions were needed.
Inside, they spent two hours disconnecting two computers, which they put on trolleys and wheeled out of the room, past the security desk, into the lift and out of the building.

Talk about physical security or lack thereof. The article says that it had to be an inside job - but surely an observant person after a month or so of watching could have figured: EDS is the provider, Techs go in and out of the server room, the server room is over there.
The question is - it sounds like the servers removed were targed specifically which would make me think that they had information from someone who works there (all servers look the same on the outside pretty much). And the big question is - Were they running Microsoft? I wonder how long it will take for this to become MicroSoft's fault?

No comments: