Akamai Insider Tried to Sell Corporate Secrets to Foreign Government

Espionage is not just for government organizations. Many corporations hold quite a few secrets that foreign governments would be very interested in knowing. Akamai had an insider that attempted to sell corporate secrets to a foreign entity in exchange for cash or acts of retribution against his ex-wife.

From CIO here:

An Akamai Technologies (AKAM) staffer was arrested Wednesday and charged with wire fraud after he provided confidential business information to an undercover federal agent that he believed to be working for an unnamed foreign government.

Elliot Doxer, a 42-year-old employee in the finance department of Akamai, an Internet content delivery company, sent an e-mail to the consulate of a country referred to only as “country X” in the criminal complaint. In that e-mail, he expressed his desire to help that country with whatever information he could obtain in his position, which he acknowledged was limited to “invoicing and customer contact information.”

The foreign consulate that Doxer contacted turned his e-mail over to law enforcement authorities, and a little over a year later, he was contacted by an FBI agent posing as a representative of “country X.” Over the next 18 months, Doxer left confidential business information such as customer lists and contracts at a designated spot called a dead drop, acts captured via video surveillance.

Doxer asked his “handler” at various times for a few thousand dollars in compensation for his trouble. He also seemed preoccupied with ill will toward his ex-wife, writing at one point that “not enough bad things can happen to her if you know what I mean.” And he offered to drop his request for monetary compensation in return for information or pictures of his son.

Akamai stressed that there is no evidence that Doxer disclosed any of the information that’s referenced in the complaint to anyone outside of law enforcement. He called Doxer a junior Akamai employee.

So reading through the lines, it seems that Doxer and his ex split and she took his kid to this foreign country. Doxer thought he could either take revenge or reunite with his son by sending this information abroad.

Akamai remains one of the most secure content delivery networks in business today. And they are very patriotic too. Their co-founder and CTO, Daniel Lewin was murdered by the 9/11 hijackers that flew his plane into the WTC towers. They have a large internet footprint and are able to identify and predict internet based attacks against web servers and happily share that information with the government.

But this type of insider attack shows that even private businesses are vulnerable to hostile foreign governments. More often than not nowadays, the cyber threats do not originate from outside of your networks. They are from the inside. You have to watch your employees.