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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

An interesting story of a data-center heist:

The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.

Ellis claims in “The Art of Robbery,” a self-published memoir written after his release from prison, he eventually learned that Ray had been contacted by a consultant employed by “some influential bankers from America.” The bankers “were involved in prime mortgages” and had “circumnavigated” certain regulations. Damning evidence of these circumnavigations could be found in banking files held in the King’s Cross area in a giant building known as a data center.

This data center was operated by the business division of Verizon, which had inherited the facility, and about 20 other data centers, through a recent series of corporate mergers. Among the corporations that rented server space from Verizon were various major financial institutions, including one of the world’s largest banks.

Ellis’s assignment was to break into the data center and steal around 80 servers that hosted the incriminating files. Ellis usually worked with a crew of four other professional thieves, but none of them knew much about computers. For this job, he concluded, he would have to smuggle in four computer technicians who could disable the servers without destroying the data they held. Ray also insisted that another man affiliated with his client join the operation. To break 80 servers out, Ellis would have to break 10 people in.

[...] Terry Ellis, for his part, can’t imagine that the Verizon job will be the last great data center heist. “Nothing is infallible,” he says. “You can get around everything. And human fallibility trumps any technology. You can have the best security in the world, but if you have a group of determined criminals who have prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, they’re going to get in.”

All it takes is a person with the determination, and intelligence, of Terry Ellis. And a dog as big as Buster.

[Source]: New York Times Magazine [nytimes.com]

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