BENGALURU: In a case of corporate espionage, a computer engineer’s bid to sell his employer’s data to a company, which he thought was a competitor, fell flat when the recipient discovered the two firms are in fact partners, and the data sought to be sold was their own.Shreesha Rao (23), a resident of Vinayaka Nagar in K R Puram, has been arrested and is now cooling his heels in judicial custody. He is a computer-aided design and drafting (CADD) professional who designs radius maps for a company called New Generation.
In a bid to make quick money, Shreesha Rao contacted another company, SBT Associates, offering to sell his employer’s data. After SBT Associates agreed, he sent the data as an attachment to his personal email, and then forwarded it to the buyer.However, Shreesha didn’t know that SBT Associates was a vendor for his employer, and that the data in question was in fact sourced from them.
Having discovered this, the CEO of SBT Associates tipped off New Generation about the data leak. The latter filed a complaint with the cyber crime police station in Bengaluru. Shreesha Rao was nabbed on Tuesday and a court sent him to judicial custody. “The value of the data that Shreesha had sent to the company is also being evaluated and we do not know what the other company had promised to pay to Shreesha,” said police.
Police sources said that it was his first job and he had graduated just a year ago. He had resigned from the job recently and was serving notice period. He had applied in multiple companies and also had offers in hand.DCP (crime-2) Jinendra Khanagavi said, “We have handed him over to judicial custody. For further investigations we will taken him to police custody later.”
What is corporate espionage?
Espionage is the collecting information that is considered confidential without the permission of its holder and sharing it with others. Corporate espionage involves getting to know competitors’ business and their modules. In corporate firms, the purpose of espionage is to gather information about the operations, vision, marketing strategies, research and development, policies or to steal exclusive products of the company.