Intellectual property such as patents, trade secrets, and even employee expertise is as valuable to an organization as its physical assets. Every year, criminals successfully use logical and physical means to illegally acquire billions of dollars in intellectual property, leading to loss of market advantage and profitability, access to business critical data, and brand reputation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports companies lose billions of dollars annually to intellectual property theft, making it essential to give the creators of ideas, blueprints, and content the ability to guard against debilitating digital theft.
Download our solution overview to learn more about how PKWARE can help companies and governments be prepared for ever-intensifying cyberattacks that target intellectual property.
Intellectual Property Is an Asset Without a Regulator
Patents, trade secrets, designs and the accumulated expertise of employees are worth as much to an organization as its physical assets. The FBI reports that companies lose billions of dollars each year to intellectual property theft.
What makes it different from regulated data is that nothing obliges a company to measure the loss. There is no notification duty, no fine and no public disclosure, so the damage arrives as lost market advantage, lost access to business-critical data and reputational harm, usually years later.
Theft Is Both Logical and Physical
Criminals acquire intellectual property by network intrusion and by simpler means: a departing employee with a copy, a contractor with broader access than the work required, a laptop that left the building.
A control that only addresses the network handles one of those. Protection attached to the file handles all of them, because the question stops being how the copy was made and becomes whether the copy is readable.
Detecting Anomalies in Access
Monitoring access to encrypted files reveals patterns that a perimeter tool cannot see. A user opening far more protected documents than their role suggests, or activity at an hour that does not match the account’s history, is visible at the data layer.
Those anomalies indicate the two cases worth catching early: a bad actor working through what they can reach, and malware performing exfiltration or preparing a ransomware event.
Real-Time Policy Enforcement
Enforcing governance, retention, protection and acceptable use by hand is slow and inaccurate, and it scales with the number of people rather than with the value of the data.
Automated scanning runs against the organization’s own definition of what is sensitive and triggers the next step from what it finds, which is what turns a written policy into something that operates without anyone remembering to operate it.
Discovery Comes Before Remediation
Knowing where the material resides is the first step and the one most often skipped. Intellectual property sits on file servers, in big data repositories, in databases and on endpoint devices, and the copies are usually the problem rather than the originals.
Once located, remediation applies the appropriate treatment by policy. Ensuring data can only be accessed by authorized personnel is what reduces the exposure to third parties who should never have been able to read it in the first place.
Why This Matters to Customers, Not Only to the Owner
Organizations that hold intellectual property usually hold someone else’s too, under a contract that assumed it would be protected.
Demonstrating that protection is increasingly part of winning the work. A security manager at a marketing and advertising company put it directly: trust from the brands they serve is central to their success, and being able to demonstrate it is what sustains the relationship.