Building a Comprehensive IT Security Program by Jeremy Wittkop

Author:Jeremy Wittkop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

Misguided Insiders

There is another group of people who believe they can take information with them that may be of benefit to them at another company, but would not cause harm to the organization they are stealing from. These people are rationalizing their behavior similarly to a car thief who believes he or she is morally superior to other car thieves because he or she steals only from large dealerships who are insured against their losses. These people live in a fantasy world in which their crimes are victimless. The truth is, anything that has value to a competitive organization would cause damage to the originating organization, simply because it helps a competitor. This is inescapable.

There is a second group of Misguided Insiders that has misconceptions with respect to the ownership of the data they use or even create. Most employees in Western countries sign an employment agreement that states any Intellectual Property they create as a course of their employment belongs to their employer. However, if you ask many people who create Intellectual Property if it is wrong for them to keep copies for themselves to reuse after they leave the organization, many would say it is not. This attitude presents major problems to organizations that develop Intellectual Property like code because large parts of code development activities in many cases are performed by contractors. If those contractors then resell the code they created to a competitor, they have immediately commoditized their own work. The organization that has paid for the work, then, has immediately lost the exclusivity they are entitled to by commissioning the creation of the Intellectual Property in question. It is difficult for many people to understand, but the concept is quite simple if you think about it. Essentially, if you create something on your own time, you own it. If you are paid to create it, it almost certainly belongs to the individual or company who paying you. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

Different cultures have different ideas with respect to ownership. Many countries, like the United States and Great Britain, have concepts regarding individual property rights, where a person or an organization that creates something has the right to ownership and exclusive use of the creation for a period of time in order to allow them to profit from it and to encourage continued innovation. There are many countries around the world, however, that believe that any creation that would be beneficial to society as a whole belongs to all people in society. The Chinese culture, and other cultures based on socialism or communism largely agrees with this philosophy. The intent is not to opine on which system is better or worse, but to highlight the fact that cultural attitudes toward Intellectual Property ownership play a major role in the security programs of multinational corporations, especially as it relates to the insider threat. The person that is an insider threat to a U.S.-based company with operations in China, may be acting in accordance with their own values and, in their minds, doing nothing wrong.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.