An engineer at the first company hacked into the second company's computers and stole designs and drawings, then passed them off as his own work. The engineer's managers, knowing the work was well above his skill level, suspected foul play but manufactured the phone anyway, Hancock said. Actually, they thought it was funny. But there's nothing funny about the loss of trade secrets to competitors. While corporate espionage is as old as the silk trade, the Internet age has made it easier, faster and much more anonymous.
Culpability is much less.
There is a lawless frontier in terms of theft of trade secrets. The weather Sports scores and news Living and Travel Hackers for hire working for foreign nationals are not merely the stuff of James Bond films, Hancock said. He's been chasing a Chinese national for six to seven years who regularly hires U.S. teen-agers to hunt down documents. Talleur, who formerly was in charge of protecting NASA's secrets from a constant barrage of foreign information-based attacks, thinks the problem is much more severe than most organizations let on. It's my belief that the country is subject to widespread dry cleaning.