Indian techie accused of $1bn Intel data theft

NEW YORK: An Indian software engineer working with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has been charged with stealing sensitive documents from his former employer Intel, said court reports on Tuesday. 

Intel has filed a criminal complaint against Biswamohan Pani, former design engineer for chipmaker Intel, in the US district court in Boston. The case is that Pani made off with information valued by Intel at more than $1 billion. He is due to appear in Boston federal court today.

Intel filed the complaint formally, after the FBI sleuths searched his house in Worcester in July, which recovered some top-secret files with details of future Intel chip designs, said a report.

Pani had resigned from Intel in May but he said the company that he could continue to work at Intel till June 11. But he started working with AMD on June 2 while he still continued with Intel.

During this period he allegedly remote-accessed the secret files with an intention to pass it on to AMD. But FBI has ruled out AMD's involvement in Pani's conduct.

On the other hand, Pani pleaded innocence in the incident and said that the design files were meant to help his wife who still works with Intel and were not intended for sale. Networking major Cisco in its recent report on data leakage had pointed to the ‘insider threat’ to corporate information.

How do you evaluate this kind of ‘insider threat’ as far as maintaining the security of data is concerned? Do you think the corporates are making serious efforts to ensure the security of their data in a highly networked environment?