The tentacles of cyber crime seem to be reaching everywhere. For one, have you considered your company’s exposure to the potential threat of trade secrets being stolen?
Trade secrets are among the primary means by which companies create and maintain value. The ability to prevent them from being stolen, copied, or eroded is one of the key factors ensuring a company’s longevity.
Even so, trade-secret theft has become a serious threat to the U.S. economy, causing damage in the range of 1% to 3% of gross domestic product, according to a new academic study.
With the principal means of trade-secret thievery shifting from betrayals by former employees to cyber attacks, companies have a surprisingly simple option for reducing the risk of such theft: Desist from disclosing the existence of trade secrets in 10-K reports.
That’s according to the new research, scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association (August 3-8).
Drawing on data from about 7,500 companies over a span of nine years, the study finds that about one third of their 10-Ks mentioned that the firms possessed trade secrets.
Even though essential information about the…
