"Any cyber expert will tell you the attacks are getting more frequent and much more sophisticated. Whether it is your personal information at home, or company information you are tasked to protect, you cannot be too cautious."
Interesting article this morning about how this country continues to hemorrhage our national treasure due to intellectual property theft. And how does that happen? For starters, blame the ubiquitous "cloud". Okay - maybe that is too harsh. Cloud computing and storage have not been around forever. But intellectual theft sure has. Which begs the question, what is intellectual theft, anyhow?
Back in my working days, one of the things I was tasked with besides negotiating and administering contracts, was the control of the company's intellectual property. Not all of it, just what was within my purview. In fact, while at my last two companies, I was also asked to give intellectual training to organizations we were dealing with. Ones we traded, under the aegis of a proprietary information exchange agreement, certain trade secrets with.
When I first received my intellectual training from the corporate attorney at the company I worked at in the 1980's, his definition of intellectual property was very clean and easy. He said there are two types of markings which should denote the distribution on any piece of company correspondence. "Company (the name of your company) Confidential", for all information which needs to "stay inside the tent". In other words, in no way should that information ever get outside the company confines unless protected by an iron clad information exchange agreement.
An ever more restrictive marking is "Company (the name of your company) Restricted". That document should NEVER go outside the company tent. Ever. And the "restricted" is for only a finite set of names.
Back to the theft of our intellectual property. Once a design is complete on some new product, the drawings (usually down to level 3) are stored electronically. All the product development costs which went into those drawings are now at risk. What I can't understand is this - in this day of state of the art encryption and decryption, why we can not get "military type" encryption to protect this information.
However, even the best encryption cannot defeat sloppy handling of information. If does take much - only one misstep and the most valuable of information can end up "in the wind". And once it is "in the wind", you must assume it has been compromised.
Any cyber expert will tell you the attacks are getting more frequent and much more sophisticated. Whether it is your personal information at home, or company information you are tasked to protect, you cannot be too cautious. As much as I hate to say it, the bad guys are out there, and their numbers are growing. Where do they hide? Either in plain sight, on cyber farms, or in the dark web. Have a care folks, have a care.
Since we share/sell our technology with our allies, who share/sell with theirs, it doesn't take long for all to possess. Then simple reverse engineering to duplicate.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the dotard's attacks on our traditional allies makes sense. If we could only get our defense industry to quit selling to anyone with funds available.
The practice of grabbing intellectual property was a staple of U.S. economic strategy since the outset of the nation’s founding.
ReplyDeleteIn 1787, for example, Andrew Mitchell was trying to smuggle new technology out of the U.K when he was intercepted by British authorities. Seized after being loaded on board a ship, his trunk contained models and drawings of one Britain's great industrial machines.
The city of Lowell, Massachusetts actually got its start after its namesake, Francis Cabot Lowell, visited England in the early 19th century and spent his time trying to figure out how the Brits had managed to automate the process of weaving cloth. Charming his way into factories, he memorized what he saw, and managed to reproduce the weaving machine.
America’s past offers two lessons for today: A country that gets an economic foothold by appropriating existing technology can benefit largely to the extent that it improves upon it – a pattern that China may soon follow. And those who live in IP glass houses shouldn’t raise tariffs.