Security Vendor gets Code Stolen - DLP and Unstructured Data (IP)
Posted by
Paul Hafen on Tue, Feb 07, 2012 @ 11:45 PM
Life is full of irony. That fact makes life interesting, but also unsettling. An anonymouse hacker made off with Symantec's pcAnywhere source code and held it for ransom before negotiations broke down. Once negotiations broke off, the hacker distributed the source code via peer-to-peer networks today.
I understand the code in question is really the 2006 edition that is hardly in use anymore. One can understand why Symantec and any other organization would still be concerned. WHAT IF THE NEXT TIME ITS THE CURRENT VERSION? Years ago I wrote an article for an industry magazine in which I mentioned that hacking and malware will become more and more a for-profit venture. As cyber criminals get more astute and the barriers drop..well, its scary to think of what the world could be like with all the IP out there. This particular crook was more savvy than the law enforcement that was called in to negotiate.
There is a principle in all this. Data Loss/Leak Prevention is necessary for any organization with unstructured intellectual property. And companies like Symantec need to have third parties evaluate their internal DLP situation(and they may already do that). For the rest of us, any solution we deploy is third party. Remember the DLP channels: Network, Endpoint, Encryption. For those companies with unstructured data, Discovery is all the more important.
Paul