Week 10 Articles
Malware Cited in Credit Card Breach
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=162639
Recently in Portland Maine, unauthorized software was secretly installed on servers in Hannaford Bros. Co.’s supermarkets in Northeast Florida. The result was a data breach that threatened up to 4.2 million credit cards. Through it all, how the Malware got into the database is completely up in the air.
While not directly a trade secret case so to speak, I wanted to bring special attention to this article because it carries some extremely potent implications for trade secret violation and security. This case may have involved consumers and a dizzying number of credit cards, but one can only imagine damage that database penetrating malware could do to companies if their trade secret documents started to come under attack. In most trade secret example, employees (as alluded to in class 18) and previous executives are normally the main subjects in question: what would happen if the hand accessing those documents is a ghost, completely unknown to the company? The danger of remote theft could be worse than a former company member taking documents, due to a remote, unknown thief being harder to track down.
Trade Secret Hyper-Regulation?
http://reason.org/commentaries/titch_20080305.shtml
Feel like displaying all your personal files to the government? If traveling abroad (especially on business), the probability for this event happening is higher than ever (especially of those among Asian or Arab decent). These random airport seizures performed by U.S Customs and Border Protection officers (CBP’s) allows an individual’s personal and business information pertained on the laptop (or various other portable devices) to be copied, and the hardware seized as well. Some individuals never got their hardware back either. As a result, many companies that have employees doing large amounts of International work require that workers wipe their hard drives before returning to the country.
While their are voices in our leadership that claim searching a laptop is the same as searching a suitcase, these current trends are leading to hyper regulation of trade secrets and more profiling-related lawsuits. This trend is open for interpretation, but has implications for causing more damage to trade secrets than helping protect them. As discussed in classes 18 and 19, the sensitive nature of trade secrets (especially in cases like these) opens up a whole new realm for lawsuits.
Homeland Security Sued for Intrusive Questioning
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/02/07
Tying into the topic above, the Asian Law Caucus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have teamed up to sue The Department of Homeland Security on harassment and profiling. Personal books, cards, notes and files have had no refuge from subjects of Border Searches. When complaining, subjects are apparently told that its the border and they have no rights. Unfortunately the secrecy surrounding these policies leaves no accountability back to America’s travelers.
As I spoke about above, these policies can pose a very real threat to all manner of trade secrets, not just those of the United States’. Foreign companies especially seem to be at risk if carrying sensitive electronic documents via electronic means.
