What’s Yours is Mine: How Employees are Putting Your Intellectual Property at Risk

Companies today are losing valuable intellectual property (IP) on a regular basis. While many security initiatives focus on threats posed by cyber criminals and hackers, there is a less obvious player in the theft of corporate assets: employees. In most cases these trusted employees are moving, sharing, and exposing sensitive data in order to do their daily jobs. In other cases, they are deliberately taking confidential information to use at their next employer, some of them without realizing that it is wrong to do so. The three parties – the employee, the organization, and the new employer – are all putting themselves at risk, and there are no real winners in any of these situations. This whitepaper explores the mindset and motivation of employees involved in IP theft.