Comment by apimade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apimade | Hacker News Reader

Data theft (i.e. taking corporate IP) was normalised until very recently (I'd say the last 2-3 years with the rise of the adoption of DLP and public litigation). A few examples I can think of thing I've heard _just_ in my own career; terabytes of client data taken by a former consultant, sales reps that joined _solely for the purpose_ of taking this quarter's leads and then ghosting the company, execs forcing the use of their buddy's startup/consultant/vendor (and then they later join the startup/consultancy/vendor). The latter being _the most common_. If you're a large company, your sales pipeline is so valuable to startups -- and from a single consultant perspective the ROI of ripping off your sales data is _insane_.

I think back to the questionable things _I've_ done that _don't_ amount to data theft, but _should have_ caused someone to probably kick off an incident/investigation.. But they didn't.

- git cloning every repository in the company (who am I kidding, I do this in _every_ company

- airdropping stuff to my personal phone (my profile photo, but it could have been the aforementioned git repos)

- using sharedrop/similar services (to copy my RSS/news feeds, favourites bars) from my work laptop

- enumerated staff/ops dashboards/tooling to get shit done (think: enumerating the CRM before Lazarus and Lap$u$ made it cool)

It used to be a thing that dev were keeping source code and all in old time.

I remember a manager during an internship telling me to do clean code because later I might have to reuse piece of code in further work experiences. It was the time when code was shared with zip and so or net shares.

At that time there wasn't that many "software shop" and it was just a way to do things in other company like hardware manufacturers. Obviously you would have been trusted not to take or disseminate or reuse company trade secret or coffee things like expected by your non competition clause in your contact anyway.

Since then, a lot of company became like "software production" company and developers are now considered like factory workers.

And in some way I would say that you are nowadays robbed of your code and there isn't even attribution anymore.

Look, in the 80/90s it was more common to know the name of the main dev of major companies, and their contributions were clearly attributed to them. But now you will very very rarely know the dev that did the code for anything. Top manager/architect/... Might be recognized but not really for their code contributions.

You’re so right, I totally forgot how normalised it was to take common functions and classes and factories. I guess ultimately, it was all worthless anyway thanks to LLM’s.

I actually recall the lead engineers in my department coming into work on their last day with a harddrive. The same people who had access to national databases, and production systems that impacted the majority of the country’s population. That simply wouldn’t happen today.

Although I’m not someone who’s dealing with PCB schematics or bleeding edge IP.

I guess I’m a dummy, I always deleted all cloned repos from companies I ever worked with. I’ve always been way too terrified to keep anything company related

Oh this was on company issued devices, I don’t keep the source code! I was just explaining how this is something that probably should have triggered an investigation, but didn’t.

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