We think we know cybercrime. Those white-collar scuzzballs Woody Guthrie sang about, the ones who used to rob us with a fountain pen instead of a six-gun, now tap a few computer keys instead.
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A colocation center accommodates online businesses that want their servers off-site: it offers space, power, cooling, massive bandwidth, and high security. By comparison, Equinix, whose colocation center near McCormick Place is described as state of the art, occupies its own building and sends out guards to check any car parked alongside it for more than five minutes. The gauntlet clients must run to reach their servers combines biometrics with pass codes, more guards, and a series of locked doors. That kind of protection isn’t cheap. James Ruffer, a C I Host client with a small start-up business, says he’s been paying C I Host $3,800 a year to house his servers and believes Equinix would charge him twice to four times as much.
C I Host rents about 10,000 square feet of space on the third floor of an eight-story brick building. (The company’s Web site lists “no signage, nondescript building” as a security feature.) Visitors are buzzed in from the street, but any tenant can do the buzzing. If they’re at all brash, intruders can slip in as tenants come and go. And once they’re inside the building—well, the plaster dust that’s still on the hallway carpet outside C I Host’s quarters tells a tale of the possibilities.
A few days after the Register broke the story of the heist, a more in-depth account ran in another e-magazine, Web Host Industry [or WHIR] News. Reporter Anastasia Tubanos wrote that although C I Host’s corporate counsel, James Eckels, described the robbers as sophisticated, familiar with the company’s operations, and technologically savvy, he also argued that some responsibility for the security breach falls on the building’s owners and even its environment—a “bad area of town.” (A post attributed to Eckels on webhostingtalk.com asserted, “Please understand that the improvements we have made and will continue to make will not be released for security purposes.” Skeptical readers wondered why not.)
“Personally we lost 4 servers and just under $5,000 in equipment last year. Since then we have taken strong metal cable and literally cabled our servers into our cabinet with a padlock. This was our way of protecting our gear and it seemed to have worked so far. Unfortunately others were not so lucky…. I personally know one customer who had a full locking cabinet that was locked. They either busted the lock, used the employees key or just pried the cabinet open to steal his servers this last time.”
Headline at a CBS Web site: “MLB Irate at A-Rod for Upstaging World Series.” Headline in Tampa’s Sun Journal: “A-Rod’s agent apologizes for upstaging World Series.” And lest you think journalism was hopelessly wedded to the word “upstaging,” Bill Madden of the New York Daily News found another way of putting it: Rodriguez was someone “who would blatantly put himself above the game.”
