Many businesses focus so much on protecting their data from outside threats that they give little thought to inside threats – namely their own staff. For a manufacturer in Chicago, that turned out to be a very costly mistake!
The company hired an engineer in 2014 and according to prosecutors within two weeks of starting the job, the engineer downloaded 3,000+ files that contained proprietary and trade secrets, including source code and blueprints. Apparently the engineer had accepted a job with a competitor in China during this same time, but he remained at the US company until he was fired for unrelated reasons the following February. The theft of the data was not immediately detected, and by the time the lawsuit was filed in 2017, the engineer had fled the country.
It is imperative to proactively identify the data that is critical to your business and how it is being protected not only from the outside, but from the inside as well!
