Two years ago, long before I joined the staff of SecurityInfoWatch.com, I was working in a small publishing firm in a northern suburb of Atlanta. We were on the ground floor in a small office building that was shared with a number of other companies. This building was a lot like a lot of the office buildings built in the early 1990s in Atlanta. It had floor-to-ceiling double-paned glass windows, lots of landscaping, a simple prox card access control system that only controlled one of the doors into the building, and of course, it backed up to a small hill covered with trees.

On one springtime Saturday night, thieves struck our offices. The evidence suggested that the thieves parked some sort of van, truck or SUV nearest the side that backed up to the woods, then used blunt object to smash out the glass of the CEO's office, and entered the office. Being a weekend after a heavy sales period, all of our computers and laptops were at the office. The sales staff was having a short break and all but one of them had left their laptops on their desk...without cables or locks. Our graphics machines for designing our magazines were on their desks and all of our other staff members' machines were on their desks too. The thieves had a heyday. The grabbed all the available laptops, then cut cables and made off with our graphics machines, gained access to our other associates' offices and left with their machines, leaving only the offices two oldest computers, the one the CEO used and an old iMac that I had been using. And while they snubbed my machine for not being a computing powerhouse, they did manage to look in my unlocked cabinet and grab a professional camera rig that I often used at the office for photo shoots.

We found the wreckage on Sunday, and slowly pieced our work back together, made all the more difficult because of the fact that we had not backed up the laptops, and the graphics machines' back-up hadn't been run in a week.

I wish I could say that was the end of it. We did what most companies would do and had an alarm system installed. It was pretty basic. It used a door sensor (we had one door in and out) and motion sensors with your basic keypad. The idea was that if they came in the door, we'd know, and if they smashed the glass, we'd know because the motion sensors scanned the perimeter hallway of the office.