Chinese firm paid insider 'to kill my company,' American CEO says

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/06/19566531-chinese-firm-paid-insider-to-kill-my-company-american-ceo-says?lite

by ethanhunt_ • 13 years ago

12 5 13 years ago

investigations.nbcnews.com

ethanhunt_• 13 years ago

causing its stock price to plummet and forcing the company to lay off half of its workforce of 900 employees

Seems like it almost destroyed the company.

I wonder how they should've protected against this. Their source code was obviously their "secret sauce", but their engineers need access to it to work. The best I can think of is Secret Gov't style protections of no external network access, but that's hardly conducive to a productive work environment.

Maybe put some backdoors into the source to phone home, but in their case I doubt the wind turbines have wifi access.

Larrikin• 13 years ago

I remember reading this story a year or so ago in Bloomberg. The source was protected by only being accessible from their internal network. The company actually put a lot of time and effort into making sure they couldn't be hacked externally before they would start working with the Chinese. That is why they ultimately had to pay an insider to steal the source

csense• 13 years ago

You might be able to compartmentalize the knowledge. I.e., design the source code to be multiple independent modules that communicate through published API's. Then each person who has to work the source only needs access to one module.

Someone would still be able to steal the module they're working on, and the specs for the other modules it communicates with, but a single spy presumably wouldn't be able to steal all of the modules.

I doubt this is much outside of defense/intelligence, though (or even in those sectors for that matter -- look at how much Manning and Snowden had access to). It'd make things much more expensive and bureaucratic, for one, and it limits your top talent by forcing them to stick to their one little slice instead of improving the pie as a whole.

AsymetricCom• 13 years ago

I wonder what the "Chinese rules" are.

ukoki• 13 years ago

They should have put up a Chinese wall.

Chinese firm paid insider 'to kill my company,' American CEO says

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