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Reminds me of this threat model: Long term moles at a company, able to climb high and perform well due to remote work which enables: - never really meeting th
by dogman144 5y ago
Reminds me of this threat model:
Long term moles at a company, able to climb high and perform well due to remote work which enables:
- never really meeting the mole
- the “mole” is a superstar because they have a team of corporate raider-employed 10x’ers evaluating and executing everything that this mole does at work. The mole’s code is written by 3x MIT grads hot swapping on the keyboard. The mole’s biz ideas come from a few HBS grads. And so on.
Productivity, business intuition, and engineering talent is off the charts for this mole. It rises far enough in the hierarchy such that it maneuvers the company towards favorable action for that corporate raider. Every idea the mole suggests, the corporate raider works in the background to enable via favorable market conditions. Whoever is the public face of the mole’a reputation might be in flames if found out, but what’s that vs netting 3% of a corporate buyout valuation.
- slumdev 5y agoIt's an interesting idea, but ascending the ladder (beyond "senior" or "line manager") usually has very little to do with productive output.
- dogman144 5y agoRight, but in come the MBAs and acting classes, and corporate raider smoothing the path on all strategic decisions this mole makes.
- slumdev 5y agoEven doing all the right things, it's so rare to ascend without quitting. Spending 3 years, earning a single promotion, and then (not immediately but shortly after) quitting and going somewhere else (for another promotion) is the surest route if applied consistently. Another route is to parlay one's background as a senior at a large company into an outsized role at a small company. Perhaps even CTO if it's a startup. After a few years as CTO, that person can work his way back into senior management at bigcorp. It's difficult to see how someone could turn this into a profitable business. But if the backer isn't interested in profit, it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies...
- dogman144 5y agoWhat backfills the motivation to do this is: 1) who is behind it, actually. This isn't about dogman144 making CTO. It's BlackRock/private fund/whatever steering companies of interested towards long term, favorable outcomes, at the cost of the salaries for 20 people mole-strike team, tough NDAs, a large finder's fee at the end, and at the benefit of 0% of the negative publicity they get for doing this sort of action out in the open. No % shares reporting anymore, no PR, no protests for buying up residential real estate in bulk, and so on. 2) how much does the figurehead mole make, as this could be an excruciatingly stressful experience Start with a fee model like 2/20 for hedge funds, and data like FireEye is getting bought out in "an all-cash transaction for $1.2 billion." At a 3% mole fee of the final transaction, thats a $36mil (edit, math :( ) payout for the mole, using FireEye numbers, putting aside 5-7 years of double-dipping Raider pay, FireEye pay. Kraft bought Cadbury for $19B. Some of the larger LBOs push $45B. There are a number of ways the incentives can work here - if this takes less time to make $3.6m than an IPO would, more surety of outcomes because you have a titan of a fund steering things, and guaranteed Partner at the fund once this is complete, and so on, the numbers likely make a bit of sense. 3) Jumping companies: also doable. Either way the mole team wants to play the long game: they really want X-company, and to do that they could do a few years of jumps. Few years at a single company, or a few years at separate companies until that "senior" mole team lands at the target company - same/same. You nail it with this: it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies. And add in the above, the payouts look good too. Is this legal, do you get on the wrong side of outside employment regs at the company, and so on? Not sure! But what's interesting to me is with remote work, this suddenly gets a whole lot more doable, an there are a lot of all-remote, pretty valuable companies (revenue, or IP access - see GitLab) out there. This puts aside all considerations of intel agencies doing this, as well.
- slumdev 5y ago> This puts aside all considerations of intel agencies doing this, as well. This seems more plausible. But still, you make a good point about the size of the reward. A low probability of success might be OK if the payoff is measured in billions. It's almost certainly illegal, but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the specifics.
- darepublic 5y agoA natural charmer is more valuable than someone with high tech ability. The charmer just needs enough tech prowess to come across well in brief interactions and their outsourced hacker team will help them with the meat of their work.
- fny 5y agoLol. You're talking about 3x MIT grads and 3x HBS grads... the mole needs to be paid north of $1M out the gate to compensate everyone.
- halgir 5y agoThey're not talking about the mole outsourcing his work so he can slack. The whole operation runs at a net loss in order to place the mole in a position to support the financier's goals.
- dogman144 5y agoExactly. The "mole" is a team in reality, a long term payout makes it worth it. Described it further down in another comment. Ya, this would be a huge undertaking with risks all over the place. But are there enough sociopaths at the funds who care about this area of corporate takeover and at tech companies doing shades of ethical stuff? I think there are, for sure.
- Groxx 5y agoThat said, given how much larger high-level position compensation is in many companies... maybe it could be a source of revenue.
- Kylekramer 5y agoThis reminds me of the Key and Peele robber sketch when the heist plan is to get a job at the bank, work there 30 years, and get a regular paycheck so the bank is giving you the loot without ever suspecting it.
- _air 5y agoHere's the Key and Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM
- hammock 5y agoThis is commonplace. It's called a no-show job. (Yes I get the joke. Just saying)
- anamexis 5y agoNo, it’s a show-up-every-day-for-30-years job.
- alisonkisk 5y agoIt's a job, not a no-show job.
- unnouinceput 5y agono work job. you show up, but don't work
- troymc 5y agoThis sounds like the plot for a really fun movie.
- ianmcgowan 5y agoThis would be a more plausible conspiracy theory with state-level actors; I imagine the TLA's have the resources to do this, and it might make sense to do at somewhere like google/intel/microsoft with some juicy payoffs. Otherwise it seems like more work than actually starting a company to do whatever the mole is accomplishing. I like that the mole's preferred pronoun is "it"..
- time0ut 5y agoThis is possibly the most interesting thing I have read this week. It is possible this happening now. The pinnacle of a social engineering attack. So how would this be detected and countered? It seems undetectable if the mole has perfect opsec. I guess an organizational structure with a lot of checks and balances might be resilient to their manipulation…
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoLove it. I'd watch this movie. In the real world, I suspect most corporate threats require significantly less effort. When I first started interviewing candidates I was surprised at how readily some people volunteered confidential information about their previous employer. I frequently have to ask people to stop sharing confidential details about their current projects or even problems their current employer is having. I've long suspected that the easiest way to extract confidential information from a company would be to pose as a reputable recruiter from a glamorous company with high wages, then simply get in touch with a company's employees and ask them what they're working on.
- dogman144 5y agoAbsolutely. This is less of a threat to a corp, and more of an extended takeover that avoids the challenges/risks with other forms of takeovers.
- tbihl 5y agoThis isn't that different from what probably happened an Nortel in the early 2000s. While their network was completely compromised by Chinese attackers, the C suite people downplayed the threat, and there are theories that this only happened because there were enough moles keeping everyone complacent so they wouldn't get too excited about the existential threat they faced. And now, after the most hostile of takeovers, they go by the name Huawei. Edit: if you want a thorough version of the Nortel story, I recommend this podcast: https://malicious.life/chinas-unrestricted-warfare-part-1/ https://malicious.life/chinas-unrestricted-warfare-part-1/
- marnett 5y agoWow this is fascinating. Can you recommend any further reading on this subject? This is a degree of corporate espionage I've never thought of before.
- vkou 5y agoAn alternative interpretation of what happened to Nortel is that they made a lot of money, got complacent, stopped innovating, sat on their laurels, utterly failed to adapt to changing demands from their customers, or to keep up with competing vendors, imploded, and then the C-suite covered for its numerous failings by blaming China. "Hackers stole our sauce" may be a plausible explanation for why a competitor got a jump-start, but its not a plausible explanation for why your business fell apart - especially considering that Cisco, Nokia, RIM, and many, many other western communication vendors continued to thrive after Nortel's disaster. Nortel died because it couldn't adapt, the same way that RIM invented the smart phone, and then died, because it couldn't compete with Apple. Also, worth noting that Canadian tech firms don't pay well, so all the talent goes south, and then those same firms grouse about their inability to compete with the valley.
- paxys 5y agoThis is more common than you may think, but is carried out by state-sponsored actors because random people and corporations won't have the time, resources or even a real need to plan a decades-long operation. Also whether the position is physical or remote has very little bearing. Moles can be planted either way. Heck the Manhattan project had Soviet agents working for it.
- FredPret 5y agoThis would make a good movie