Google Espionage: Same Egg’s in a New Basket

The recent incident at Google shook the entire world, but was it merely a one-off incident or a wake-up call? Did the event gather importance just because Google threatened to pull out of China or stop the so called censorship or was there something more sinister? I tried to explore a little.

Speaking of corporate espionage, it’s nothing new to the developed world. Nokia’s so-called attempts to monitor its employees, Porche & VW case are not unknown in the 21st century.  There was another interesting case in 2005 where an employee allegedly transferred product information before he was supposed to switch to that start-up venture.  In 2007 Oracle suspected that SAP had been hacking and stealing secrets from its computer systems. Oracle went to court with the case!

In recent years the focus has shifted with countries realizing the power of internet. It is alleged that corporate espionage has taken a step further with certain developing countries taking the short way out to success in trying to steal the important research papers, innovations, designs etc. By any means investing a few millions on high-tech thieves is cheaper than investing billions in doing R&D and not getting desired results! I guess this is what some countries think nowadays!

As per FBI even though 75% of cases of data theft involve an insider, as we all know our security is only as strong as our weakest link! Still the 25% cases are not a small number to forget about. It is in these 25% cases do countries who want to spy, invest millions to find loopholes & steal data remotely. Firstly it is safer to deny such an act and secondly it’s much harder to prove such a crime’s origin, if the attacker is sophisticated/ cautious enough.

Yes Google did get hacked due to a flaw in the browser one of its biggest current competitors failed to fix since ages, but does Google end its responsibility here. If my email gets hacked and all my bank account details get stolen, does all my responsibility go away? In my opinion NO, I am responsible for all my activities- from setting a password to saving important details on my mail. In case of a breach, no doubt I should take legal recourse, but it should not be my primary objective. Google should have detected such a breach as soon as it had occurred. No one knows the exact monetary estimate of the hack & what all data was lost.

I think there is another side of the coin as well, than just Google crying foul over being broken into. After all Google always knew beforehand what it was treading into once it accepted all regulations that Chinese government asked it for. It chose a little compromise to enter the world’s 3rd biggest economy & now it’s alleging that it’s been compromised! Strange!

Corporate espionage isn’t new, what is new is the method & motivation. After all, we must be prepared with better security than asking people to stop hacking us & crying foul! Risk management is a key business area & Google would have accounted for such risks long ago.

@kakroo

img: datmoney.com