Only last week, we wrote about a lawsuit filed by Valeo against Nvidia, alleging that a former employee had stolen Valeo source code and took it with him to his new employer, Nvidia. Today, we have yet another example of the insider threat posed by leavers. This time, from the world of professional sports.
This lawsuit alleges that a former employee of the NBA team the New York Knicks shared confidential information with his new employer, the Toronto Raptors. According to the lawsuit, after the employee gave notice, he began collecting data and login credentials to take with him.
As most organizations already appreciate, leavers can represent an immediate insider threat. It might not be coaching data, as it was in the case of the Knicks and Raptors, but customer contacts, Salesforce reports, presentations, source code, process documents, and more; it’s all fair game for leavers.
More often than not, there’s no malice behind their actions. It’s simply a desire to keep hold of data that could benefit them in their new role. Perhaps a list of potential sales contacts, or simply some examples of their work they’d like to keep for reference.
In the lawsuit, the Knicks identify the forwarding of proprietary information, including coaching data, scouting reports, and spreadsheets containing analytics, from the ex-employee’s Knicks email account to his personal Gmail.
It turns out they even had an Insider Risk Management program. The problem is that it was designed only to detect data theft, not stop it.
This is exactly why Endpoint Protector by CoSoSys focuses attention on the endpoint. Unfortunately, many of today’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are built only to protect where your data lives; not where it’s used and where it can leak from. That’s why, when it comes to avoiding the operational disruption, financial loss, and reputational damage that results from data loss, we look at the challenge differently. We understand that what happens on the endpoint matters and, as the only constant between your employees and your data, the endpoint has become the critical threat vector.
Endpoint Protector is built to continuously protect data exit points including email clients, enterprise messaging apps, browser uploads to the cloud, removable media, printers, and more, even when the endpoint is offline.
Put simply, with the right policies in place, Endpoint Protector could have detected and prevented the unauthorized exfiltration of the Knicks’ sensitive data.
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Request a demo of Endpoint Protector to learn more about how you can protect your data from unauthorized exfiltration, and mitigate the risk of leavers taking your intellectual property with them.
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