Here is an interesting article from the Globe and Mail, in Toronto, Canada. The article was written by Jordan Robertson and is entitled, Companies Beware: The Next Big Leak Could be Yours. The article offers portentous information about disgruntled employees and leaky security systems and how you can find your company’s sensitive and proprietary information as one big data dump. Competitors and assorted spoil sports could have at it. Not good.
Picture if you will…an employer’s innermost secrets out on display like a trussed pig, for all to see. There would be company e-mails, documents, databases and internal websites that are thought secured from the outside world. You confidential correspondence, records of your strategy, research and development, product roll outs and what nots, all where the world can examine them. Some of it can be embarrassing, and some of it could be ruinous. All because a disgruntled employee decided to pass this on to someone he knew would make it public. Or, for that matter, to a competitor. Remember the idiots a few years ago who tried to pass the Coca Cola recipe to Pepsico? Or the other way around. In any case, neither company would reduce itself to such larceny and the once employed were left to face criminal charges.
You think it doesn’t happen all that much? Think again. The article reports that an analyst with Countrywide Financial Corp., now owned by Bank of America, is awaiting trial on charges he downloaded data on potentially 2 million customers and then s old off the information to competitors for sales leads. His rates were $500 for every 20,000 profiles. According to prosecutors,the analyst liked to work Sundays, stealing the data and uploading them to thumb drives.
Robertson lists several cases. I am sure there are more. Especially with this economy, employee theft and corporate espionage is on the increase. Tighten up, before it’s too late.
