

Chinese firm paid insider 'to kill my company,' American CEO says - ethanhunt_
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/06/19566531-chinese-firm-paid-insider-to-kill-my-company-american-ceo-says?lite

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ethanhunt_
> causing its stock price to plummet and forcing the company to lay off half
> of its workforce of 900 employees

Seems like it almost destroyed the company.

I wonder how they should've protected against this. Their source code was
obviously their "secret sauce", but their engineers need access to it to work.
The best I can think of is Secret Gov't style protections of no external
network access, but that's hardly conducive to a productive work environment.

Maybe put some backdoors into the source to phone home, but in their case I
doubt the wind turbines have wifi access.

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csense
You might be able to compartmentalize the knowledge. I.e., design the source
code to be multiple independent modules that communicate through published
API's. Then each person who has to work the source only needs access to one
module.

Someone would still be able to steal the module they're working on, and the
specs for the other modules it communicates with, but a single spy presumably
wouldn't be able to steal all of the modules.

I doubt this is much outside of defense/intelligence, though (or even in those
sectors for that matter -- look at how much Manning and Snowden had access
to). It'd make things much more expensive and bureaucratic, for one, and it
limits your top talent by forcing them to stick to their one little slice
instead of improving the pie as a whole.

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ukoki
They should have put up a Chinese wall.

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AsymetricCom
I wonder what the "Chinese rules" are.

