3 ms·

This brings up a question that isn't new at all: How do you secure your designs and data from "walking away"? In the really old days a significant piece of wo

This brings up a question that isn't new at all: How do you secure your designs and data from "walking away"? In the really old days a significant piece of work may have required a sizable external hard drive to steal. Then came writable DVD's and you could move ~5GB per disk with ease. With USB drives one could move 64GB for about $40 on a keychain. Then there are services such as Dropbox. And, of course, anyone could setup a server for a few bucks and FTP gobs of files if allowed. Other than reactively (lawsuit once discovered, etc.), how are companies protecting from having digital work product stolen by less-than-honest employees? These days physical products are designed entirely digitally. All of the CAD, CAM, EDA and code are files that are easily moved. This can be a huge problem. How far does trust go? And how dangerous is the seemingly innocent "taking work home" event once and if an employee leaves the company?

sk5t 14y ago
Companies often turn to DRM software like Liquid Machines, Active Directory RMS, etc. Of course these won't stop a determined thief with access and motive from photographing or transcribing data, but it can be useful to protect against redistribution of complex work (such as the Excel spreadsheets upon which more than a few substantial businesses are built).
hkmurakami 14y ago
My current employer blocked all external storage devices on company machines (this has been rather annoying for engineers, as you can imagine). Dropbox was blocked about 6 months later. I don't think Google Drive has been blocked yet. This is really kind of futile since someone who is really motivated to steal IP is going to be able to get around these restrictions. A previous employer of mine had thousands of design documents stolen by an engineer (employee) from China, who then successfully fled to China. This made national headlines and was considered a serious national security / competitiveness issue. After this incident, all personal computing devices and storage media were banned from company premises. Random bag checks were routinely conducted at entry points to company premises. However, bag checks were fairly poorly done so I'm not sure what this really accomplished. I wonder how the company is dealing with the proliferation of smartphones though, because they haven't banned them from premises yet from what I understand.

sk5t 14y ago

Companies often turn to DRM software like Liquid Machines, Active Directory RMS, etc. Of course these won't stop a determined thief with access and motive from photographing or transcribing data, but it can be useful to protect against redistribution of complex work (such as the Excel spreadsheets upon which more than a few substantial businesses are built).

hkmurakami 14y ago

My current employer blocked all external storage devices on company machines (this has been rather annoying for engineers, as you can imagine). Dropbox was blocked about 6 months later. I don't think Google Drive has been blocked yet. This is really kind of futile since someone who is really motivated to steal IP is going to be able to get around these restrictions. A previous employer of mine had thousands of design documents stolen by an engineer (employee) from China, who then successfully fled to China. This made national headlines and was considered a serious national security / competitiveness issue. After this incident, all personal computing devices and storage media were banned from company premises. Random bag checks were routinely conducted at entry points to company premises. However, bag checks were fairly poorly done so I'm not sure what this really accomplished. I wonder how the company is dealing with the proliferation of smartphones though, because they haven't banned them from premises yet from what I understand.