Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#431

Post by resolutebat » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 4:57 AM UTC

tppiotrowski wrote: post #384

feverzsj wrote: post #27

So he was already CEO/CTO of 2 China companies while still working in google. And these information are publicly available right after he registering them. Seems a management disaster of google.

Are you prohibited from owning a company or acting as the CEO of a company while employed by Google?

You're supposed to declare anything that's a potential conflict of interest, and Google is large enough to have a lot of interests. So if you're moonlighting as an Uber driver, Google's probably cool with it (at least if Waymo is not in your hood); if you're moonlighting trying to build the next Uber for X, Google probably would not be.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#432

Post by leoh » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 4:59 AM UTC

curt15 wrote: post #390

lfmunoz4 wrote: post #319

Wonder if any Americans go to Chinese tech companies to steal secrets or if there is just nothing there to steal.

Wouldn't Americans find life behind the GFW pretty suffocating?

VPNs

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#433

Post by resolutebat » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 4:59 AM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #252

physPop wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't "give up their nationality". Chinese government's position is that once Chinese always Chinese, and emmigrating doesn't affect that. They will still come after your family on mainland. Or use their "local police" forces stationed in most western countries to harass you in your new location.

Do you not know any first generation Chinese Americans to say such inaccurate statements? This is incredibly inaccurate, naturalized citizens are treated as foreigners by the PRC.

Only when it's convenient to the PRC to do so. When it isn't, they're Chinese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai

Who, after being kidnapped, conveniently and totes voluntarily applied to have his Chinese citizenship reinstated.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#434

Post by calculatte » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #362

prepend wrote: post #357

It’s interesting to me that google doesn’t do a security clearance review on its engineers. I’ve had a security clearance in the past and there’s no way a foreign national passes. I got questioned significantly about a family member who was a citizen of another country. I wonder if it’s just a matter of time.

Is it your contention that Google should never hire anyone born outside of USA or without USA citizenship? Do you realise how much of their workforce that would preclude?

How many software engineers were laid off in the US over the past year? Shortage of talent is not the issue.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#435

Post by fragmede » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:02 AM UTC

baka367 wrote: post #397

billy99k wrote: post #128

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 layer…

A copy of Google3 would take an outsider eons to replicate Borg for any of it to run on.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#436

Post by pradn » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:07 AM UTC

wg0 wrote: post #210

What exactly sterling secrets looks like? Suppose I work on a video streaming service. Spent 8 years. Now I know in and out of it. The ffmpeg the queues the buckets the meta data and what not. Someone hires me. I build a steaming service. But this time I'm much more polished and faster. Is this stealing too?

No, that would be your government or employer preventing you from using your specialized skills to earn a living. In theory, a competitor can hire you for your skills - but your new employer will make it clear they are "only hiring you for your skills, not your proprietary knowledge". I've see that clause even as a junior employee.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#437

Post by throw393200 » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:10 AM UTC

hnburnsy wrote: post #373

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

There have been a lot of falsely accused "spies" recently like Xiaoxing Xi, Sherry Chen, and Anming Hu.

All charges were eventually dropped.

I wonder what will happen with this case.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#438

Post by Nerada » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:33 AM UTC

deelowe wrote: post #342

alephnerd wrote: post #195

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?

Essentially you hook up all your log sources to a User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) platform, it comes up with a model of "normal" behaviour, and flags users for investigation when they start acting outside of those norms (or things you want to explicitly flag on).

No data egress for 6 months, then 20GBs of outbound traffic? Someone's getting notified to take a look and see what that was and where you sent it. You only authenticate against one host on the network, and suddenly you're hitting thousands of hosts? Someone's getting notified to investigate, &c.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#439

Post by kshacker » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:50 AM UTC

orochimaaru wrote: post #401

ttul wrote: post #193

If any of you get this far down, one thing that caught my eye is that Google said they had analyzed this guy’s network traffic after locking his laptop, confirming various things. If you work at a large company like Google, every packet on their employee access network is recorded and indexed for forensic purposes. This is not something Google would talk about publicly, but it’s standard practice in any company that…

This is standard practice in all big companies. Everything is tracked and recorded. If you want to say something to a colleague that you don’t want management to know - use your personal phone and talk at a coffee shop or bar in person.

Asking for a friend :) On VPN at home, using my work laptop, I happen to browse some non-decent content, more than once, maybe routinely. Is that all tracked or do VPNs have routing to use VPN only for company network, and leave NSFW be handled by my ISP? Or even if is going via ISP and not company network, are the companies usually able to track what all sites I visit

Not a Google employee BTW, but work for a company that I am reasonably sure does monitor their network.

Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets

#440

Post by bongodongobob » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 5:56 AM UTC

opello wrote: post #408

alephnerd wrote: post #195

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.

It absolutely has to be more nuanced than "there's exabytes of pcaps somewhere" because cloning repositories, pushing branches, backups, these things would basically end up being nasty amplification attacks against the ability to store this data. And block dedupe can work for some storage loads, but it's not solving this problem, especially when that git clone came over ssh or https. Data from employee devices all be…

Yeah you plug holes so you don't have to audit everything. Disable USB ports, alert on large file transfers, audit file access and device logins, no access to local network shares off-site, etc. That's probably good enough for 99% of the world.

Capturing all network traffic is absurd and I doubt that's even a thing. You'd need a department the size of the existing company to be able to manage and do anything meaningful with it. Maybe if you had a super secure jump box you could consider monitoring all the traffic on that, but there are much much easier ways to audit behavior than network traffic. Monitor the devices instead.