Computerworld - I recently received a call from one of my company's intellectual-property lawyers, who suspected that someone had stolen the source code to one of our products. A license for the product costs more than $10,000, so the possibility that it might have been taken was cause for great alarm.
Here's what happened: Our company entered into a joint development agreement with another firm and provided a Solaris workstation containing the source code for the software in question for purposes of interoperability testing with our partner's products.
During the course of the integration work, one of the other firm's employees was laid off. Prior to his departure, the employee, now disgruntled, claimed that an unnamed colleague had copied our company's source code for his own use. The colleague allegedly had bragged about using parts of our code to create a new product. Upon hearing this, our attorney immediately ordered the server brought down and the system's internal hard drive returned. My task was to determine, if possible, whether the source code had been copied—and by whom.
Faced with a forensic analysis of the hard drive, I had three options. I could do the work in-house, outsource all of the work or outsource part of it. To avoid bias or conflict of interest, I decided to outsource the entire project.
Finding an Expert
My first job was to find a reputable, capable and efficient forensic analyst to do the work quickly. I called a few people I used to work with who had expertise in this area. The first person said he could create a mirror image of the drive, but he wasn't skilled enough with the Solaris operating system to provide an analysis that would prove—or disprove—the transfer of our company's source code. The other fellow had the Solaris skills we needed but had his hands full indefinitely with work related to the Enron Corp. case. However, he gave me a reference, and I also obtained references from other information security professionals and found the names of reputable firms through an Internet search.
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