Friday, April 4, 2008

Lady sneaking confidential data through customs gets busted

The feds have indicated a software engineer who was flying to China with confidential technical documents, a thumb drive, four external hard drives, 29 recordable compact discs, and a videotape. [Source]

First of all the monitoring at the airport has increased big time and it has also raised privacy concerns. China is the only country that is messing with US and there have been multiple reports of Chinese govt. employed hackers gaining access to pentagon and stealing confidential stuff.

Carrying data of a company for whom you work is quite normal but provided it is not misused, this an excellent example of industrial espionage because the Chinese lady who got arrested sneaking out with the secrets was working with 2 companies at the same time and both the companies were competitors.

A big question comes to my mind that Are we allowed to work at 2 different places ? Yes, but provided only if your job is a part-time job and as far as I know part-timers don´t have access to confidential data unless they hack. But there is surely something fishy and more details on this incident are surely supposed to uncover a lot and this will make the China vs US fight a little more interesting.

She was surely dumb because when she can have a big fat internet pip to upload data why did she carry all the confidential stuff all the way through customs ? No Wonder she got caught and If she was surely working for those companies this gives a solid proof that insider threats are for real and cannot be underestimated.

-ABhiz

No comments: