Is nothing sacred ?

Several UK PC repair shops (inc large chains) caught stealing personal/financial data/passwords.

Sky News Undercover Laptop Investigation: Computer Shop Suspended By Trade Body | UK News | Sky News

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laidbackfreak

damn shame if you ask me, I fear this sadly is going to hit the smaller shops rather than the bigger chains.I'm all for supporting the little guy but this is going to scare a lot of people off using them.

Although if you think about the cases where larger chains have reported owners to the police for illegal stuff on the hard-drives then that should serve as a warning that if you take a pc to any shop you should be aware that ANYTHING on your hard drive is going to be looked at.

Lose - lose for customers here and a big WIN for repairers who can gain a good reputation by word of mouth as always.

Sadly in all works of life there are people ready to exploit and steal from others.

bertieb

Scrotes.

ipconfig.all

I hope the justice system works lol

dynamik

laidbackfreak wrote: »

Although if you think about the cases where larger chains have reported owners to the police for illegal stuff on the hard-drives then that should serve as a warning that if you take a pc to any shop you should be aware that ANYTHING on your hard drive is going to be looked at.

We've had to call the police for kiddie p*rn. We weren't even prying. We were just robocopying things to a new drive and noticed the filenames...

laidbackfreak

dynamik wrote: »

We've had to call the police for kiddie p*rn. We weren't even prying. We were just robocopying things to a new drive and noticed the filenames...

And I'm glad you made the call

Interesting that it was the filenames that caught your attention, had the file names been movie or song titles would they have caught your eye ?

Playing devils advocate here to see when people would\wouldnt look ?

maybe I should've worded my original statment along the lines of "has the potential to be looked at"

Kaminsky

dynamik wrote: »

We've had to call the police for kiddie p*rn. We weren't even prying. We were just robocopying things to a new drive and noticed the filenames...

I've had that when asked to clean up a user's PC. Eventually, the guy got off as in my attempts to clean the PC of virus/adware/etc, and then discovered the tens of thousands of images, the police deemed that there was no point sending it to court as they would have a field day with me tampering with evidence. /sigh

msteinhilber

dynamik wrote: »

We've had to call the police for kiddie p*rn. We weren't even prying. We were just robocopying things to a new drive and noticed the filenames...

We've been down that road several times in my time working the retail repair grind. A couple of times it was not a big deal at all, it was right out there and came about through the normal course of the repair and nothing really came about from it. Then one time when it occurred in one of the very liberal cities it somehow leaked out and it hit the fan - nevermind it was child ****, we had clearly invaded this person's privacy even though nobody had been actively searching for anything.

Back to the original topic, it doesn't surprise me at all to be honest. With the global economy suffering I think it's only plausible to have more things like this happening. I know when our home was broken into this year and I spoke to the police they mentioned the year prior there was only a single reported burglary while this year there had been 8 or so already and that was relatively early on in the year that this happened too.

dynamik

Some people are really unabashed about what they have on their machines. This old dude told his to copy his pictures over, so we just went to copy the pictures, and it was basically all p*rn. One guy even paid like $700 in data recovery to get all his smut back. I'm like dude, don't you have internet access?

I think it should be common knowledge that anything you have on your PC is accessible to people working on it. If you have sensitive information on there, don't bring it in. You could have them put your HD in an external enclosure in front of you, and then put in a new HD in and repair everything. It's a bit more time consuming and expensive, but I'd never trust any of those people with anything important.

This is one of the funnier things we do. For people who switch hard drives, need data recovery, etc., we hold their data for 30 days for them. We pointed iTunes to that drive, and now we have years of music

I'm pretty sure these people will get off too. Digital forensics is tricky business, and there's no way the chain of custody wasn't broke. You still have to make the call, otherwise you may be liable since you didn't report the crime.

PC509

Glad you called, too.

I work on computers all the time, and even copy files from one PC to the other the old fashioned way (folder to shared network folder), so I can see whats in them if I wanted. I don't. I don't go looking for anything. I have my own personal ethics that I live by, and privacy is a big one. I don't invade someone elses and they don't invade mine. Golden Rule, too. If I saw something like kiddie po*n, I'd make the call, though. But, that comes up as pretty obvious.

One place I worked at previously, an ISP, one of our sys admins would monitor what people were doing all the time. Bad idea, I thought. He found someone looking at what he thought was kiddie po*n, so he logged it and screwed around with him.... I don't think anything came of it, but I didn't think it was right to spy on the users like that. It was what he "thought" was the ****, no evidence.

I think there should be a PC Tech code of ethics that we hold ourselves to, but like all, it's easily broken by the few a-holes out there that are in it for the quick buck.

darkerosxx

The System Administrators' Code of Ethics | League of Professional System Administrators

I have this up on my wall.

skrpune

darkerosxx wrote: »

The System Administrators' Code of Ethics | League of Professional System Administrators

I have this up on my wall.

that's wonderful - if only more people lived by that code.

In general, it's really sad that more people don't know where to draw the line ethically. There's a certain amount of power that comes with technical knowledge and the access you're given, and if it's abused then it just gives us all a bad name. A pox upon them.

undomiel

Back when I worked the phones I for one had a great time with the guy who was out of warranty calling up stating that his warez server was down and that we needed to get it up yesterday. He was losing thousands by the minute he claimed.