The survey found that the greatest risks for companies were former employees, foreign and domestic competitors and on-site contractors. Hackers were also considered a major problem. The most common areas of infiltration were R&D, customer lists and financial data, whilst the greatest impact of losses came through increased legal fees and loss of revenue.
The Trends in Proprietary Information Loss Survey was conducted earlier this year among 138 Fortune 1,000 companies and 600 SEMs that belong to the US Chamber of Commerce and tracked looses between 1st July 2000 and 30th June, 2001.
The authors of the report point out that intellectual property assets are not typically tracked in corporate accounting systems. For this reason, they “not well protected”, and many companies don’t value them until litigation.