Ex-Employee of LBI, Inc. Stole More Than 5,000 Sensitive Files via Dropbox

Delaware, USA – July 13, 2018 – Jared Dylan Sparks stole from LBI, Inc. more than 5,000 files of confidential information related to the development of underwater drones. Sparks worked for the company from January 2010 to December 2011, and shortly before the move to a competing company, a former engineer uploaded documentation from his work computer into his Dropbox account for several projects for Navy contractors, as well as photographs and SolidWorks and AutoCAD models. The attacker then uninstalled the Dropbox client from the computer. Some documents Sparks sent from the corporate mailbox to his Gmail account. A jury found Sparks guilty of stealing trade secrets, a sentencing hearing has not yet been passed, but the ex-engineer can face up to approximately 130 years in prison. The second suspect was found not guilty and cleared of all charges.

These days, various cloud services are implemented in many organizations, but it is quite difficult to control their use by employees. The use of the so-called Shadow IT, even without malicious intent, poses a serious threat to the security of the organization. Shadow IT Framework allows SIEM administrators to track cloud services used by employees in business-processes so they can quickly intervene to prevent data leaks. Also, this use case is useful for compliance monitoring.