Theft of Proprietary Information

While some may consider information theft and the theft of proprietary information the same, there is an important difference between commercial information about customers or services and software programs written by a company. Here proprietary information relates to any software process or code written for a company to facilitate a process or to sell as a product. The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA), amongst others, are trade bodies acting on behalf of software manufacturers in countering this threat. Organisations should be aware that its own employees may be guilty of copying programs from one PC to another and therefore breaking the software licence.

Hackers, as previously mentioned are also active in this area. Source code for operating systems is an especially prized target - as Microsoft has found to its cost.