Intellectual Property Theft: What It Is and How to Prevent It

Why Is It Important to Protect Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property theft can result in significant financial losses for organizations, not to mention compliance and legal issues, affecting their operations and growth. Unauthorized parties or malicious employees gaining access to IP-related data can lead to theft of ideas and the introduction of original products by these entities faster and more cost-effectively than the legal IP owner.

Common Causes of Intellectual Property Theft

Common vectors of intellectual property theft include hacking, privilege abuse by employees and subcontractors, and human errors. Cybercriminals can gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and IP through techniques like phishing and malware infiltration. Privilege abuse involves individuals with access to data stealing it for sale or personal use. Human errors, often due to carelessness or lack of awareness, can also lead to data breaches and IP theft. Dealing with stolen IP is a lengthy and expensive process, requiring legal action that may take years. To prevent IP loss, organizations should implement best practices such as securing patents, trade secrets, copyrights, and trademarks, and educating employees on cybersecurity awareness.

7 Best Practices to Prevent Intellectual Property Theft

Protecting your IP involves taking measures to ensure the security of confidential information in your company’s digital systems and physical settings. This article will concentrate on securing your intellectual property online, which includes the following best practices:

1. Identify your most valuable data

In order to prevent intellectual property theft, it is important to have a clear understanding of what intellectual property your company possesses and where it is located. It is necessary for all employees to handle this data carefully, which can be achieved through effective communication between executives and all departments. When identifying the locations of your intellectual property, it is important to consider cloud applications and file sharing services, corporate networks, servers, and storage drives, employees’ personal devices, and third-party systems and applications.

2. Identify security gaps in your system

To ensure strong cybersecurity, it is important to regularly review user access rights and assess any weaknesses in your system. By adopting the mindset of an attacker, you can identify potential targets and secure them effectively. Conducting a cybersecurity risk assessment is a reliable method for uncovering vulnerabilities. This process allows you to determine which information assets are at risk and identify the specific threats to those assets. In addition to safeguarding intellectual property, it is crucial to evaluate the security of your hardware, networks, devices, and customer and employee data. When you find weaknesses, take immediate action to address them. One simple step is to continually update your operating systems and software, enabling automatic updates whenever possible.

3. Regularly review all access to IP

A periodic review of user access to sensitive data is a great practice that helps you reduce the risk of privilege abuse and security breaches. This involves re-evaluating user roles, access rights and privileges, and user credentials. If, for example, an employee with access to IP changes departments within your organization, they may still have access IP after the switch. To mitigate such insider threat risks and strengthen your access management, you can use a privileged access management (PAM) solution, which allows you to granularly manage access rights of all privileged and regular users in your IT infrastructure.

4. Establish a data security policy

Having a strong data security policy is crucial for safeguarding valuable information within a corporation, which consists of guidelines that employees are expected to adhere to. To ensure its effectiveness, it should include specific guidelines such as password management rules, restrictions on password reuse, clear rules on privacy settings for mobile apps and online accounts, and details about the ‘bring your own device’ protocols. It should also include information on employee responsibility regarding the use of sensitive data, security protocols for accessing corporate systems and networks, and guidelines regarding downloading and installing software

5. Monitor employee activity

Continuous employee monitoring is an effective way for businesses to ensure secure work practices within their network. It encourages employees to follow cybersecurity protocols and avoid visiting risky websites that can lead to malware infections and data breaches. It also aids in investigating incidents of intellectual property theft. Use a solution that offers various monitoring capabilities for different types of users, including employees, privileged users, and third-party vendors. This enables real-time identification and investigation of potential threats.

6. Establish a baseline of normal activity

In addition to monitoring users, it is important to use advanced technologies that can help prevent potential threats. Many real-time change auditing solutions uses machine learning algorithms to establish a baseline of user behavior and notify security officers if a user is acting suspiciously. This can indicate malicious intent or a compromised account. For instance, you can automatically detect if employees are logging into your systems outside of working hours. By using such solutions, you can quickly identify and address abnormal user behavior to prevent IP theft.

7. Educate employees

To prevent IP theft, it is crucial to educate employees about cybersecurity, especially considering the rise of remote and hybrid work environments. The data-centric approach to security has gained traction, whereby businesses are starting to prioritize educating employees and cultivating trust rather than relying solely on perimeter-based controls. Additionally, teaching employees how to identify and avoid phishing attacks is essential since this tactic remains a common choice for cybercriminals.

How Lepide Helps Prevent Intellectual Property Theft

In today’s digital age, cybercriminals and malicious employees often target corporate intellectual property, as it can be easily sold for profit. However, this does not mean that you cannot protect your sensitive data. By using the security practices mentioned above, and a dedicated data-centric auditing solution, you can prevent theft of intellectual property.

The Lepide Data Security Platform can play a crucial role in protecting intellectual property by securely gathering event data from various cloud platforms such as Office 365, Dropbox, Amazon S3, G Suite, and others. Through a user-friendly dashboard, you can closely monitor any changes made to your sensitive information in real-time. Any suspicious activities are immediately flagged and reported to you. Moreover, our platform includes a data classification feature that thoroughly scans your repositories for IP and classifies it accordingly. This allows you to easily manage access controls and ensure only authorized users have the right permissions. To maintain compliance, our platform enables you to generate comprehensive reports summarizing all incidents related to your IP. These reports can be shared with relevant authorities as evidence of compliance. Using machine learning models, our software establishes a baseline of user activity and detects anomalies for potential security breaches. It can also detect and respond to events that exceed pre-defined threshold conditions, further fortifying your IP’s protection.

If you’d like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help to safeguard your Intellectual Property, schedule a demo with one of our engineers.