The Theft of Business Innovation: an ACM-BCS Roundtable on Threats to Global Competitiveness

Abstract

Valuable information assets stretch more broadly than just bank accounts, financial-services transactions, or secret, patentable inventions. In many cases, everything that defines a successful business model resides on one or more directly or indirectly Internet-connected personal computers (e-mail, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, etc.), in corporate databases, in software that implements business practices, or collectively on thousands of TCP/IP-enabled realtime plant controllers. While not the traditional high-powered information repositories one normally thinks of as attractive intellectual property targets, these systems do represent a complete knowledge set of a business’ operations. Criminals, who have come to understand that these information assets have very real value, have set up mechanisms to steal and resell them, bringing great financial harm to their original owners.