"Golden" hardware — in South Korea, a thief cleaned out a design bureau, taking only DDR5 memory.

The shortage of components and the rapid rise in electronics prices have given rise to a new type of crime. A curious but telling case has been reported in South Korea. A thief broke into the office of a design company and, ignoring expensive monitors and peripherals, opened up system units to steal only DDR5 RAM modules.

The incident became known thanks to the Korean forum Zod, where one of the employees of the affected company shared photos of the dismantled computers. According to him, the thief acted very selectively. The office had modern workstations equipped with powerful video cards and processors, but the criminal did not waste time dismantling heavy components. Instead, he carefully removed four Micron DDR5-5600 memory modules, each with 32 GB, leaving all other equipment untouched.

Users on the internet are already being ironic, calling the thief a "collector" or "investor," but for businesses, such raids are becoming a serious threat. Now South Korean companies are considering additional security measures not only for the perimeter of their offices, but also for the insides of the PCs themselves.

The situation clearly demonstrates that when the cost of components begins to account for up to a third of the price of the entire device, the system unit ceases to be just a working tool and becomes a real safe on legs.