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Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

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Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's SOP in all companies, not just those facing sophisticated threat actors - there's a reason EDRs like Crowdstrike and SentinelOne are massive players now.

I've never been exposed to that side of things but always wondered do certain levels datamine this information? For example, do they get reports on user activity during the day... A pareto of employee activity perhaps by userid? I mean, why wouldn't they?

I’ve done this sort of work and my anecdotal experience was it is mostly used to flag blacklisted activities from occurring on the computer spanning things like porn and gambling sites to administrative privileges, but also to modify what level of access these computers had for interacting with different infrastructure between silos.

You could use the data to identify activity levels or behavior patterns of the people using the device but it would cost a ton more money and a larger team to do that plus the other responsibilities we had simultaneously.

My experience is also not with employee owned devices so in my mind there’s nothing wrong with doing it’s agreed to and is imperative to their function as an employees especially with HIPPA concerned.

I think there was some BYOD stuff that was starting at one point and we had to run an emulator on their personal devices so the programs we run to collect logs were sandboxed from their regular phones.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#393
post #118
post #91

The opsec of the people who eventually get indicted is always terrible. If you wanted to exfiltrate source code or docs, why the heck would you use the victim's own cloud storage product? You would just point a camera at your display and scroll through the desired materials, or use HDMI capture, or something along those lines.

Survivorship bias in action? The only ones we hear about are the ones who are sloppy enough to get caught. The people who know how to not get caught, doesn't get caught so we never hear about them.

Definitely. We’re certainly not living in a world where we catch more of these people than we don’t.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#394

This doesn't surprise me. I knew someone that intentionally graduated with a specific major, so they could get a job in that industry and send trade secrets/IP back to China. The purpose was to create a competing company. It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company and I think eventually gave up and went back home.

> It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP? In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one, but even in other industries I guess what you don’t have access to after 6 months you won’t have access to realistically ever. > eventually…

If you're going to steal secrets, do it slowly, don't pull a Levandowski and copy everything in a noticable way so that security gets alerted, at which point it may take you forever to exfiltrate data.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#396

This doesn't surprise me. I knew someone that intentionally graduated with a specific major, so they could get a job in that industry and send trade secrets/IP back to China. The purpose was to create a competing company. It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company and I think eventually gave up and went back home.

> It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP? In software engineering you get access to the repos on day one, but even in other industries I guess what you don’t have access to after 6 months you won’t have access to realistically ever. > eventually…

> I don’t understand what you are saying here. How many months does one need to stay to hover up the trade secrets / IP?

Presumably the more valuable the IP, the harder it is to access.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#397

This doesn't surprise me. I knew someone that intentionally graduated with a specific major, so they could get a job in that industry and send trade secrets/IP back to China. The purpose was to create a competing company. It didn't work out for them that well. They couldn't last more than 6 months at any one company and I think eventually gave up and went back home.

Repositories are rarely worth much.

Sure, some algorithms there might save you some time, but its often the design and the data where the money lies (what this guy focused on).

Clone google's repo and you'll likely struggle forever to get anything of substance running on a rando vm/docker/etc. not to mention about spinning the entire stack with interconnected services, certificates, shitty code, and layers upon layers of hacking that can only be resolved by relying on the tribal knowledge on whomever built the darn thing.

Compared to that - detailed design docs, a team of motivated Chinese dudes/ettes with some monetary support from the local party, and you can have a close-enough copy running natively on the Alibaba cloud in a few months.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#398

Chinese or not, this guy is a thief and violated rules of being honest. He also kept a high profile in China and did that on purpose for fame and fortune. Shame on him - Said a Chinese

I'm more surprised at how openly he did this kind of stuff. They even have Goole office in China, how he was not worried about getting pinged randomly!

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#400

Here is the indictment since AP News can't be bothered to link to it... https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1341356/dl?inline

Interesting. The guy copied source code via copy paste... And it seems, also regular Google documents. He was already caught uploading secret stuff, quit Google and bought a ticket to go to China, and was arrested only because he delayed the trip by a few weeks which was enough time for Google to discover more violations and contact the FBI. Google didn't contact the FBI until they learned of older violations. Which…

Reminds me of the time I quit my job at a large corp and my boss advised me to not do any large downloads in the days just before I left because "IT has tools to scan for that and they might think you're trying to take secrets with you."

Guess this guy didn't get the memo.

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