Here’s a sobering statistic: 70 percent of departing employees, whether they are leaving on their own or have been asked to leave, take confidential information from their employer with them. Not every one of those employees is acting with malicious intent, but that doesn’t reduce the danger to your company.
“Every company has unique ways of operating,” says Jonathan Theders, president of Clark-Theders Insurance Agency Inc. “When we think of trade secrets, we think of top-secret files, but it can just as easily be ways of doing business that are confidential.”
Smart Business spoke with Theders about how data theft can affect your company and how to prevent departing employees from taking your information with them.
What types of data are most commonly taken, and why?
Some of the most popular things that are taken are intellectual property, trade secrets and known company records. This includes prospect and customer contact lists. In studies, when they were asked why they took data, most believed they had a personal ownership of that data. They created it; it was their contact list, so they feel they have the right to it.
How can this harm a company?
Here’s an example. In 2009, The DuPont Co. filed a lawsuit for breach of contract for misappropriation of trade secrets. The company alleged a research scientist stole 600 files by copying them to a portable hard drive. More than 550 files were found on his home computer; DuPont valued that information at $400 million.
Think about the value your confidential documents and files would have to another company, for instance, if competitors knew how you do business, or came into possession of all of the data you keep on your clients, such as when their contracts are up for review and other things of that nature.
How do employees take data?
The nature of where data is today makes it easy. Employees can use CDs or DVDs, USB storage devices, or just e-mail information. The ease of access to and transmission of large documents is so easy.
One area that is being ignored is smart phones. More smart phones were sold in 2010 than PCs, the first time that has ever happened. If your iPhone has 32 GB of memory, that’s larger than many older computers and definitely large enough to store these confidential files.
Smart phones work as off-site computers; companies encouraging people to log in from home and working remotely is becoming more common. People don’t necessarily intend to be malicious, but 70 percent of home computers where people log in remotely have confidential information stored on them.
If you are working on something at home and you save it to your hard drive and upload the finished product, how often do you delete the document from your personal hard drive when you’re done? How many employers ask to see an employee’s personal computer to verify they don’t have confidential information stored there? It’s just not natural to ask those questions.
And it’s not only computer files; it can be paper documents too.
