Yesterday the car manufacturer Renault filed a criminal complaint on an industrial espionage case in which it asserts that a foreign company sought to obtain secrets related to its electric car program.
The case involved 3 executives which have since been suspended. In an age where technology is advancing at a pace never seen in our lifetime, organizations will continue to jostle for dominance. In jostling for dominance like the 3 executives that have been suspended on suspicion to sell corporate intellectual property to a rival car manufacturer, there similar executives who will lay aside corporate ethics to pay for stolen confidential information.
You would think that becoming an executive means that you have earned the trust of your employer, considered to be a person of integrity and on the path to an accomplished career. Therefore considering the risk of being found out and ending a career due to industrial espionage, such an offer is completely out of the question. If you are that promising executive will you will blow the whistle on such an offer? What happens if your are offered say $750K or anything north of $1m for such information, will you say “NO”?
Last year a similar corporate espionage case happened at Accenture where an employee faked medical leave to work for HCL, a direct competitor while stealing data from Accenture computers. Throughout his medical leave, Accenture made available to the employee its secure online network containing confidential and proprietary information, known as Accenture’s Knowledge Exchange (“KX”).
During the medical leave the employee downloaded more than 900 documents from the KX system. The vast majority of these files were downloaded after the former Accenture employee began working for HCL. There is nothing to suggest that HCL was complicit in this crime.
Other high profile cases industrial espionage cases in 2010 to name a few are:-
- A former General Motors engineer and her husband conspired to steal trade secrets about hybrid technology and use the information to make private deals with Chinese competitors.
- A rogue MI6 agent attempted to sell MI6 confidential documents to the Dutch intelligence services for £2M GBP ($3M USD).
- Motorola Inc, the US maker of mobile phones and two-way radios, sued rival Huawei Technologies Co for allegedly conspiring with former employees to steal trade secrets.
There is also the case of the former Ford product engineer who in 2009 stole over 4,000 confidential documents containing trade secrets from the company’s computers to sell to a rival car manufacturer based in China. The calculated loss to Ford is said to be between $50 to $100 million.
In light of these cases of industrial espionage, can organizations continue to bury their heads in the sand saying “We trust all our employees”? Are the examples laid out above not strong cases for putting the right data security measures in place and avoiding huge financial loses which could jeopardize jobs and and the very future of the business?
Organizations need to investigate endpoint security tools like enterprise rights management (also known as information rights management), data loss prevention, email encryption and many other tools that can specifically lock data down.
At the same time it is not just about deploying data security tools alone. I believe the greatest tool to prevent industrial espionage is making data security part of the organization’s culture. Training on data security and its impact on the community, employee’s and shareholders should happen on a regular basis. It should be talked up in all corporate communications.
Industrial espionage will be on the rise in 2011, some will be detected, others will not, while some of the detected ones will be covered up internally with the aim of saving the organization the embarrassment of a data breach. The question is what will your organization do to prevent it becoming a victim of industrial espionage?
