Big time data theft event, this time by an employee leaving Intel to go to work for AMD. A Worcester, Mass. man has been charged with stealing trade secrets worth more than $1 billion.
Biswamohan Pani, 33, was indicted for allegedly stealing trade secrets from Intel’s Hudson, Mass. facility and downloading confidential documents from Intel offices in California.
According to the indictment, Pani gave notice to leave Intel and told his superiors he was using up about a week of vacation while looking for a job at a hedge fund.
In reality, according to the indictment, he had taken a job at Intel rival AMD and, while using up vacation time at Intel, was downloading documents marked by Intel as confidential. Without going into the entire discussion of Intel’s management of intellectual property, there are some interesting questions:
Why was an employee, who had announced he was leaving, and was running down vacation at home – even allowed to have access to Intel file servers?
How did Intel discover that confidential documents were being downloaded? Does Intel use data loss prevention technology? were they tipped off by another employee? or did the investigation start once Intel discovered that the employee was going to work for a competitor and then they started checking download logs?
Full article on the Sacremento Business Journal