GB Hackers provides one of this week’s examples of the insider threat:
The sequence of events sounds like it was taken straight from a movie script. Five software programmers were working late into the night, chatting on their phones while they worked.
During the wee hours of October 9, between 1:00 am and 4:00 am, they managed to hack the company’s primary server and successfully gained access to sensitive customer data, which they then proceeded to steal.
The following day, all five software company employees in Chennai showed up to work in Bengaluru or Chennai, where they joined their coworkers in expressing their shock and horror at the loss of sensitive information belonging to five of the company’s most valuable clients.
The business owner had no idea what was happening as he saw his six years of hard work go down the drain.
But there was even more bad news awaiting him after he found his employees defected with the information, formed their own company the next day, and contacted the clients after changing their credentials so the company’s owner couldn’t even contact them.
Read more at GB Hackers.
For another one of this week’s reminders of the insider threat, see this editorial in The Asahi Shimbun about how a “prolonged, systemic failure in data security management resulted in a 10-year leak of personal information in about 9 million cases stored at a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corp. (NTT West).”
