Читать книгу Cybersecurity For Dummies - Joseph Steinberg - Страница 54

Criminals can use data stolen from businesses for a number of nefarious purposes:

 Making stock trades: Similar to the criminals mentioned earlier in this chapter who tamper with data in order to manipulate financial markets, criminals may also seek to steal data in order to have advance knowledge of how a particular business’s current and yet unreported quarter is going. They then use that insider information to illegally trade stocks or options, thereby potentially making a significant profit.

 Selling data to unscrupulous competitors: Criminals who steal sales pipeline information, documents containing details of future products, or other sensitive information can sell that data to unscrupulous competitors or to unscrupulous employees working at competitors whose management may never find out how such employees suddenly improved their performance.

 Leaking data to the media: Sensitive data can embarrass the victim and cause its stock to decline (perhaps after selling short some shares).

 Leaking data covered by privacy regulations: The victim may be potentially fined.

 Recruiting employees: By recruiting employees or selling the information to other firms looking to hire employees with similar skills or with knowledge of competitions’ systems, criminals who steal emails and discover communication between employees that indicates that one or more employees are unhappy in their current positions can sell that information to parties looking to hire.

 Stealing and using intellectual property: Parties that steal the source code for computer software may be able to avoid paying licensing fees to the software’s rightful owner. Parties that steal design documents created by others after extensive research and development can easily save millions of dollars — and, sometimes, even billions of dollars — in research and development costs. For more on the effects of this type of theft, see the nearby sidebar “How a cyberbreach cost one company $1 billion without 1 cent being stolen.”