In 
The Situation...
Shankar Saxena was shocked to see the full page ad of Whites Appliances announcing the launch of their new fully automatic washing machine. Not only was the look and feel of the product similar to the product that Shankars company Makton India was about to launch, its technical specifications matched too.
Ignoring his cup of tea, Shankar immediately logged on to the Whites website and what he saw hit him in the gut, like a hammer. Even the website had the same elements that his team had put together in their plan.
Soon, he was sitting with his key team members and legal experts trying to figure out the source of the information leak and also to understand whether there was any legal action that Makton could initiate against Whites.
The only person missing was Ravi Narayan who had been driving the project till recently, but had decided to quit a month ago for higher pursuits in life. Was he the man to be blamed?
Shankar quickly checked with the IT team on any anomaly in the usage of Ravis laptop or e-mail and was told that there was none. In fact, the technology team was quite sure that their security policies and tools restricted one from copying any classified data on laptops or any external storage device or printing the same.
So how did the data fly out? Shankar asked. Could he have mailed the design details? he wondered. Not from the official e-mail, his CIO informed, adding that the Makton office network did not allow users to log on to any personal e-mail accounts either.
Meanwhile, the legal team informed that since the tech specifications of Whites new product closely matched that of Maktons, the company could explore the possibility of filing a copyright theft case and seek damages.
The key to the case is the evidence of theft without which it would be difficult to prove that Makton was the company that had originally designed the product, the legal team said.
The big questions...
- What should the technology team of Makton India do to find out the source of leakage and collect the vital evidence of theft in a format that it is admissible in a court of law?
- What are the precautions in terms of policy changes and security tools that Makton needs to put in place to prevent recurrence of similar mishaps?
Check out the answers...
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