Intellectual property theft is now a bigger threat to cyber security than malicious hacking attacks or cyber war, a software security expert has warned businesses.
Chief executive of cyber security firm Symantec, Steve Bennett, has confirmed that the theft of intellectual property had extremely “dangerous consequences” for the economy as a whole if innovation cannot be protected by its creator.
Mr Bennett said that businesses of all sizes and across all sectors needed to do more to protect intellectual property, through sharing information about cyber attackers in a bid to stamp them out.
“What I’m most concerned about for the world is the economic threat if intellectual property is transferred from IP creators to countries with lower costs. It will have a big negative impact on global economic growth,” Mr Bennett – who sits on the US national security telecommunications advisory committee – told the Financial Times.
Indicating the extent of the problem were new figures from investigations agency Kroll which showed that the number of companies suffering cyber attacks from external sources aimed at stealing commercial secrets doubled over the course of the 2012-13 financial year, when compared with the year prior. Information theft is second only to the physical theft of assets in terms of fraud levels.
The “biggest enterprise risk” for companies that create intellectual property was hackers invading corporate networks to steal items ranging from source code to product plans, Mr Bennett added. Meanwhile, attacks on small businesses were seen to have risen by 50 per cent annually.