Recently I was in a meeting with a global pharmaceutical client in New Jersey who told me of the importance they place on their highly secure, centrally managed and monitored persistent security platform to protect against data theft and ensure that their valuable R&D information cannot be lost or inadvertently sent to a competitor.
As the meeting ended, I was informed of the news about the charges brought against five people in the Untied States around trade secret theft inside another global pharmaceutical company. Allegedly a senior level manager at the company was involved in this theft.
Given the global state of business competition, there is a special appeal to the cyber thugs with high-priced or high-demand items. There is an alarming interest in stealing intellectual property, trade secrets and exactly how these items are produced.
A recent Verizon Data Breach Report 2015 identified Manufacturing as the most commonly attacked industry sector for cyber espionage.
Another recent worldwide study by consulting firm PwC and CIO and CSO magazines, “The Global State of Information Security Survey 2016”, provides some alarming indicators of the security threat landscape:
- Theft of “hard” intellectual property increased 56% in 2015
- Employees remain the most cited source of compromise
- Incidents attributed to partners climbed 22%
It is time that organizations with high value data shift their security focus from the perimeter to insider threats to lock down R&D data, intellectual property and trade secrets. Today technology advancements afford a variety of methods for an employee, contractor or a partner to take critical data electronically from an organization. There are many ways for a trusted insider to steal or inadvertently share sensitive data – printing paper documents, copying files to hard drives, downloading information onto a CD or a USB memory stick, and screen captures are a few such methods as examples.
When we add mobility adoption in the workforce and how this adds to the complexity of securing high value data, this task seems almost insurmountable. Targeting and protecting critical value data ensures that a company maintains its intellectual property, R&D work and its competitive edge in the market.
Protecting this data need not be such a daunting task. A data-centric persistent security approach can effectively help you protect and lock down your data.
