It turned out be the largest theft of prescription drugs in United States history, as described by the authorities, and it was intricately orchestrated and meticulously executed. The late-night operation lasted five hours, with the thieves descending into an Eli Lilly warehouse in Enfield, Conn., cutting a hole in the roof of the warehouse and lowering themselves with ropes after compromising the alarm system. Over the next five hours, they used a forklift inside the warehouse to load the drugs into a tractor-trailer and made off with approximately $80 million worth of prescription drugs, which were loaded into a truck and eventually driven to Florida.
Copper theft has become a major crime in the United States, thanks to record prices for the metal and hard economic times. As a New York Timesarticle put it, the current conditions have “spurred a resurgence in the past several months in the theft of common items that in better economic times might be overlooked — among them, catalytic converters from automobiles and copper wiring that is being stripped out of overhead power lines, tornado warning sirens, coal mines and foreclosed homes, where thieves sometimes tear down walls to get to copper pipes and wiring.”
Sometimes finding the solution to a security problem is about changing how you look at it. This can be a challenge, particularly if the problem is costly or is a significant safety threat. Our first reaction may be to find the most familiar or simplest way to make an immediate impact on the issue. But true security leadership requires us to stop and think about the problem through the eyes of the business and its goals, and to change our tactics based on what we see. One good example of this is how companies have dealt with the problem of theft of copper and other valuable metals.
