IIf you haven’t seen the news about Lyft and its former COO, check out the great write-up by Ryan Lawler over at TechCrunch.com.
Lyft Inc. is a company based out of San Francisco, California that helps commuters organize ride-sharing via a free app.
Lyft Inc. filed a complaint in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that Travis VanderZanden transferred sensitive company information to his personal Dropbox account before resigning. VanderZanden is the former COO of Lyft and the current VP at competitor, Uber. The information he allegedly transferred was confidential strategic product plans, financials, forecasts, and growth data.
This is the latest example of an insider risk becoming an insider threat resulting in an insider-driven data leak with some good old-fashioned cutthroat competitiveness mixed in. It made headlines due to the current popularity of Uber and Lyft and the fact that the employee allegedly involved was a ‘C’ level employee. The harsh reality is that this type of data theft happens more often than you would think.
There is a treasure trove of information readily available on the DEFCON 1 level threat to organizational IP posed by departing employees . And there are some rock-solid, common sense best practices put forth by really smart people on how to deal with this type of problem. Hint: it involves monitoring the online activity of employees you suspect may be leaving, or know are leaving your team, plus reviewing 30 days of online activity of employees who left the company for things like…well, read the complaint Lyft filed for some really good examples.
We hear about cases like these pretty regularly because our customers use our software to help them detect, and respond to them. I’m aware of millions and millions of dollars in damages recovered by our customers using information discovered using our products. I am also aware of many instances of customers finding out about IP theft in progress, and putting a stop to it’ again because of our software.
Don’t let IP Theft put your company name in the papers on the Internet, and on behalf of COO’s everywhere ‘say it ain’t so, Travis.
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