Canal Plus Technologies, a subsidiary of French media
giant Vivendi, filed a lawsuit last March against NDS, a
division of News Corp. Canal accused NDS of hacking
into its pay TV smart cards and distributing the cracked
codes freely on a piracy Web site. It sued NDS for $1.1
billion in lost revenues. This provided a rare glimpse into
information age, hacker-based, corporate espionage
tactics.
Executives of publicly traded design software developer
Avant! went to jail for purchasing batches of computer
code from former employees of Cadence in 1997.
Reuters Analytics, an American subsidiary of Reuters
Holdings, was accused in 1998 of theft of proprietary
information from Bloomberg by stealing source codes
from its computers.
In December 2001, Say Lye Ow, a Malaysian subject and
a former employee of Intel, was sentenced to 24 months in
prison for illicitly copying computer files containing
advanced designs of Intel's Merced (Itanium)
microprocessor. It was the crowning achievement of a
collaboration between the FBI's High-Tech squad and the
US Attorney's Office CHIP - Computer Hacking and
Intellectual Property - unit.
U.S. Attorney David W. Shapiro said: "People and
companies who steal intellectual property are thieves just
as bank robbers are thieves. In this case, the Itanium
microprocessor is an extremely valuable product that took
Intel and HP years to develop. These cases should send
the message throughout Silicon Valley and the Northern
District that the U.S. Attorney's Office takes seriously the
theft of intellectual property and will prosecute these
cases to the full extent of the law".
Yet, such cases are vastly more common than publicly
acknowledged.
"People have struck up online friendships with employers
and then lured them into conspiracy to commit espionage.
People have put bounties on laptops of executives. People
have disguised themselves as janitors to gain physical
access," Richard Power, editorial director of the Computer
Security Institute told MSNBC.
Marshall Phelps, IBM Vice President for Commercial and
Industry Relations admitted to the Senate Judiciary
Committee as early as April 1992:
"Among the most blatant actions are outright theft of
corporate proprietary assets. Such theft has occurred from
many quarters: competitors, governments seeking to
bolster national industrial champions, even employees.
Unfortunately, IBM has been the victim of such acts".
Raytheon, a once thriving defense contractor, released
"SilentRunner", a $25,000-65,000 software package
designed to counter the "insider threat". Its brochure,
quoted by "Wired", says:
"We know that 84 percent of your network threats can be
expected to come from inside your organization.... This
least intrusive of all detection systems will guard the
integrity of your network against abuses from
unauthorized employees, former employees, hackers or
terrorists and competitors".
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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