Work theft

Today was not a great day at work: I discovered that my work laptop was stolen over the weekend. They only took my laptop and accessories and my boss’s ipad, so it must’ve been a quick grab-and-go. We think one of the other tenants left an outside door unlocked, and an unused side door of our offices was somehow unlocked.

I normally take my work laptop home over the weekend just in case something comes up. Friday, we had the company Christmas party, though, and I decided to leave the laptop. I do have the ability to work from my home laptop if need be.

Once again, I’ve learned the importance of having a backup by not having one. Due to problems with our backup system at work, me switching computers, and various other circumstances, I do not have a backup, besides maybe some pretty old copies of some files. I don’t think I lost anything critical, but I absolutely lost years of useful files, including:

  • all emails (we’re using POP) and chat logs
  • notes and example code files from work on sites / problems
  • possibly work on projects that don’t use our normal system (Embark, WordPress, PhoneGap)
  • work on some dozen feature branches on our CMS repo

I also lost my local dev setup, including:

  • all apps installed and configured
  • local server environment installed and configured
  • local site based on our CMS with various pages and configuration set up for testing
  • ssh keys set up for our sites and servers
  • system and everything else configured to my liking

It will take some time to get up and running on one of our older computers. I’ve only gotten the OS installed and updated so far.

I hope that they aren’t able to get into my account and have to wipe the hard drive. I’ve removed the ssh key from our servers and changed some passwords, but there are a lot of things that could be on there, and possibly some other risks that I haven’t thought of.

A police officer came by, got info on the case, and even took a partial fingerprint. He took my phone number, so I will have to answer unrecognized calls for a little while. He said they have a system with the pawn shops, so hopefully it gets found there.

We have beefed up our security now, including security cameras and an improved door lock situation. Hopefully that prevents this from happening again.