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Industrial espionage: scale and responsibility

03/01/2020Industrial espionage: scale and responsibility

Employees are often a resource. Sometimes a real threath. The number of illegal acts committed by employees against former or actual employers is growing and yet only few companies, especially among SMEs in EU are actually evaluating the risk associated with industrial espionage and cyber-theft of trade secrets by their employees.

Trade secrets are defined as valuable knowledge and information that companies treat as confidential, relying on it as a fundamental asset for their market competitive advantage. In Italy, Legislative decree 63/2018, which introduced significant changes in the protection of industrial secrets from a civil and criminal point of view, support stakeholders and SMEs who had grasped the importance of protecting their data, now more then ever. But, what are the changes made and what does the law establish? First of all, the decree has modified article 99 of the Italian industrial property code, expressly qualifying as illegal not only the conduct of the person who illegitimately steals trade secrets, but introducing third party responsibilities, referring to the entity that receive and use the information. The entity therefore became equally responsible if the latter knows the illegal origin of the information stolen.

Economic impacts are proportionate to the value of the information and data stolen. Losing information or data of significant value can have a direct impact on turnover and can even lead to bankruptcy.

An actual example: a worker starts a new collaboration with a new employer and spreads and uses confidential information learned during the previous experience. At this point the responsibility is obviously on the worker, but it also falls on the new employer who uses these notions and confidential data to gain competitive and economic advantage.

According to the changes made to Article 623 of the Criminal Code, anyone who chooses to use this information for their own or others' profit will also be sanctioned. The amendments to the law therefore represent a new form of protection for companies which in any case are responsible for operating in such a way as to protect customers' sensitive data together with their trade secrets. Just think that; in the event of legal proceedings relating to the acquisition, use or unlawful disclosure of trade secrets; the judge considers, among other things, the measures taken by the legitimate holder to protect trade secrets.

So what must the company do to protect itself? Companies can suffer substantial value depreciation if it becomes public that they have been hacked, including lost value of customer relationships, loss of contracts, and devaluation of trade name.

It is necessary to intervene on the mechanisms for classifying the level of secrecy of documents, updating internal processes and regulating the use of IT tools by collaborators. Furthermore, with regard to the customers sensitive data management, it is increasingly important to intervene on corporate software usage to make it fully compatible with the new GDPR regulation.

When it is necessary to manage particularly sensitive information, the company can finally adopt specific internal policies in accordance with article 4 of the Workers' Statute. The employer is allowed, within the terms established by law, to control the use of company computers, e-mail and cell phones used by employees, as tools where sensitive data transits. Employers can also develop confidentiality agreements with specific penal clauses with its collaborators or employees in order to better protect confidential information.

Employers can and sometimes must foster the use of common cybersecurity standards and assessment frameworks and toolkits in cooperation with the legislators, in order to implement mid- and long-term policies, as well as practical solutions able to mitigate cyber-theft of trade secrets and the subsequent serious impacts on European businesses. This requires a synergic and coordinated effort also at international level, given the cross-border dimension of the problem.

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The importance of GDPR and the leaks into the present systems

02/01/2019The importance of GDPR and the leaks into the present systems

On 24th May 2016 the General Data Protection Regulation n. 2016/679, or the so called GDPR, came into force, it was put in place just since 25 May 2018, but as a regulation it has still to be implemented without any leeway by all the EU States. The aim of GDPR is the definitive harmonization of regulation in the field of personal data protection within the EU, because the personal data protection has become after the Treaty of Lisbon's agreements one of the fundamental citizen rights, and it must be equally guaranteed within all the EU area.

Into an increasing digital reality, GDPR aim is to:

  • increase citizen trust in digital exchanges, thanks to a rigorous protection;
  • promote the EU digital evolution;
  • protect free movements of personal data;

Thanks to GDPR we move from a proprietary data concept, by which we can't treat any personal data without consent, towards to a control data concept, promoting together free data traffic and reinforcement of personal rights: data owner must know that data are used and the way they are used, so to protect himself and community from the dangers of inner data treatments.

The actual information systems need to conform to GDPR European new rule system, to accomplish those goals, in order to solve two main dangerous treats:

  • Protect the acquirement method of personal data, that has in itself many possible leaks of GDPR violation;
  • Reinforce the data hierarchical control system within the companies, which actually doesn't allow a multilevel data protection.

The first problem concerns those companies which acquire and manage data in improper ways: that's the case, for example, of phone companies and marketing agencies, because when they acquire a new customer with an automatic contractual agreement and save his personal data to treat it and, eventually, sell it to third parties for marketing, actually they do it in a definitely uncareful way.

The second problem concerns the information system inside the company: the data system should provide a hierarchical data management, so that from the top of the corporate "pyramid" , the top decision maker can come through accesses and treats of customer's data more than a lower level manager, whom in its lower role, should have a limited data access and possible treatment.

In order to conform companies methods and systems for customer data treatment to GDPR, Innovazioni Tecnologiche works in an international research team to implement actual systems within the BPR4GDPR project (http://www.bpr4gdpr.eu/), that has been implemented thanks to Horizon 2020 European funds.

In this innovative leading prospective, it's a strategically essential move, to choose the professional skilled up to date knowledge of the team Innovazioni Tecnologiche to make your treatment data system compliant with GDPR, in light even of these following distinctive factors:

- .net and SQL Server (Microsoft) reliable and qualified developers are less and less available on the market in order to quality service and performance time;

- our partnership in BPR4GDPR project gives us a high specialization to upgrade actual software not compliant to new regulation for its architecture and processes;

- then Innovazioni Tecnologiche organization claims a case history based upon an estate agency network and a twenty years experience of logistic and in the railway field software, which has given us higher skills to  implement software and solving problems about new GDPR European rules.

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