Our client suspected a large data theft had occurred when an employee left the business and set up in competition. They began to lose contracts and could not understand how else the competitor knew to undercut them.
They were also concerned that insiders were continuing to feed data to the competitor as they delivered an internal change programme.
The client had two key questions – how to shut down the leaks they were certain were taking place, and how to prove that the competitor had taken their data.
Our Intellectual Property team gained legal orders against the competitor based on a forensic analysis of the data that had been left behind.
The competitor refused to allow their database to be searched directly to ascertain if had been copied. MDR Cyber were able to forensically acquire our clients' copy of the database and developed a tool to create a one-way hash of the major fields. This process was repeated by an independent forensics provider under court order allowing both data sets to be compared without revealing the underlying data to either party
The team also conducted an internal investigation, helping identify other parties who were leaking information.
The analysis conducted by MDR Cyber showed that over 90% of the records in the databases were identical, and they had been added at a single point in time.
This led to a positive judgement for our client and removed the need for costly disclosure processes to protect the underlying data’s confidentiality.