Billion-Dollar Secrets Stolen by Employee
What can be done to protect businesses from having proprietary technology stolen?
By Dhina Clement, Marketing –
A scientist named Hongjin Tan who had worked for the Oklahoma petroleum company for 18 months, was found guilty of stealing trade secrets from the company. He told his superior that he was resigning to return to China to care for his aging parents. However, he told his colleague that he was going to work for Xiamen Tungsten. Xiamen Tungsten is a firm in China that distributes metal products and supplies battery materials, for which he had been stealing Oklahoma petroleum company’s proprietary information. His superior alerted the FBI immediately and soon after they found out that along with the trade secret worth an estimated $1 billion, he was also caught downloading sensitive documents on a thumb drive that dealt with innovative technology that took decades of researching and developing.
According to the FBI, this is nothing new because a few Chinese companies use “China’s Thousand Talents Program” which provides financial incentives and other privileges to participants who are willing to send back the research and technology knowledge they can access while working in the United States”. One thing a company could do to protect themselves from people like Tan is to periodically test their employees to using a using the new innovative lie detection technology called EyeDetect®. Each examinee can be seated in front of the EyeDetect Station monitor and respond to a series of true/false statements for approximately 30 minutes. Using a high-resolution infrared camera, the technology will track changes in pupil size and differences in the way a subject reads statements and gives the results instantly. EyeDetect’s Portability, Accuracy (90%) & Speed Allows for dishonest employees to be identified and fired.
