In today’s business world, information is as valuable an asset as cash. Since 2013, there have been 9,230,693,578 data records lost or stolen in data breaches.  Only 4% of those breaches were “Secure Breaches” with “Encrypted Data”, which rendered the stolen data useless.  Large corporation’s losses are drastically higher – as well as their long-term effects. Keep in mind that data breaches and associated losses are often under reported. Data breaches often include legal actions, heavy sanctioning, loss of public confidence, strict regulatory actions and even loss in share price. In other cases, businesses were not able to recover at all after a significant incident.

Intellectual Property (IP) theft costs U.S. businesses more than $250 billion each year. Some of the biggest perpetrators of IP theft are employees and 3rd party suppliers that serve in technical positions. However, Withum (“AuroraSecurity”) has had several investigatory support cases involving senior executives committing lP Theft.

In some of the more serious incidents, AuroraSecurity has identified hacktivists, cyber criminals, hostile competitors and employees engaged in IP theft for a variety of reasons. These reasons include but are not limited to fraud, extortion, circumvention of controls, public embarrassment of the company and senior executive leadership, insider trading (especially as it relates to mergers and acquisitions), earnings and forecast information, unauthorized disclosure of executive bonuses, perpetrators intent on instigation of regulatory and legal actions in order to paralyze business operations, personal financial gain, enticement of the competitor for transitional employment opportunities in return for confidential information, competitive advantages through unauthorized disclosure of proprietary information, advantages over tense situations such contract bidding or underbidding, contract and legal disputes, as well as just for public notoriety guised as ‘whistle blowing’.