The war on leaked intellectual property

By Jian Zhen, LogLogic

January 5, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - According to a survey by Accenture Ltd., approximately 60% to 80% of your company's assets are represented by intangible assets such as intellectual property, or IP.
IP includes things such as patents, trademarks, brands, trade secrets, designs, architectures, copyrights, algorithms, software code, hardware schematics, inventions, business processes and many other assets. These are properties that may or may not have a physical presence. They exist mostly in the digital world.
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Society for Industrial Security International estimated that U.S. companies lost up to $59 billion in intellectual property and proprietary information between July 2000 and June 2001. The largest average dollar value of loss per incident occurred in research and development ($404,000), followed by financial data ($356,000).
This probably isn't surprising to information security professionals, since most IP leaks involve insiders. Insiders are generally considered trusted users who have access to a network, whether they are connected on the internal LAN or through virtual private networks. Insiders can be current and former employees, contractors or business partners.
Any one of these people could be dissatisfied and decide to send a few design specs to a competitor. Once the secret is out, it's extremely difficult to contain. IP litigation, if you choose to go that route, can cost from several hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars. This amount doesn't even include the cost due to loss of reputation, brand, speed to market and other factors.
So how does a company go about securing its IP and make sure access to IP is tracked?
Enterprise content management
The first class of companies to attack this problem is the enterprise content management (ECM) vendors, such as FileNet Corp., Documentum Inc., Interwoven Inc., Open Text Corp., Stellent Inc. and Vignette Corp. These vendors generally provide centralized document management capabilities that allow users to:

Organize and classify electronic documents

Search documents using keywords

Share documents with other users

Check in and check out documents for editing

Version control for all documents

Audit all access to documents

These vendors' main solution to the IP leakage problem is to ensure that all access to electronic documents is recorded and reported. These vendors' products will help manage and track documents when they're stored centrally on the server. These products can track who has accessed which file at what time, how many times files are accessed and how often people access these files.
Some of the more sophisticated products can also tell you the access behavior by individual users. For example, if a

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Centralized Data Backup and Your WAN
Is your organization prepared to tackle the massive challenge of protecting your data in a cost effective and timely manner? With a growing...

Why Compliance Pays
This OnDemand webcast explores the relationship that firms with best compliance records have higher revenue, greater customer retention, lower financial losses from data...

An All-in-One Approach to Web Security
Granting web access to employees poses challenges to IT administrators and introduces unique security risks. Even as companies have perfected their security techniques...

Best Practices for Managing Business Risks from the Use of IT
(Source: Symantec) Based on exhaustive benchmarks conducted by the IT Policy Compliance, this session highlights the relationship between business risks and use of...

The Hidden Dangers of Spam
Beyond the well-understood productivity drain that spam inflicts on businesses, threats posed by illicit email circulating through a network are causing many security...

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

Open Source Security Myths Dispelled
(Source: Astaro) Open Source Software is computer software whose source code is available to the general public. This openly viewable nature...

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Webinar
(Source: Sun) This webinar replay discusses Sun OpenSSO Enterprise innovation--the single, open-source solution that helps your business solve the challenges around internal access...

Best Practices for Backing Up VMware® with Veritas NetBackup™
VMware® is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. With this in mind, Symantec...

Agile Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Rapid ROI
(Source: IBM) Content rich business processes are a core feature of daily operations at just about any organization today. Very often these essential...

All White Papers | All Webcasts