Business secrets and Wikileaks

It’s not just governments that fear the widespread sharing of secrets. Firms are beginning to realise that their confidential information is at risk too. We’ve heard about the recent problems at Santander who have inadvertently distributed account details to the wider public. That was the result of a mishap. But what if companies begin to find that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep hold of sensitive information?

The digital archive of a big bank contains many secrets. So when WikiLeaks, promised to publish five gigabytes of files from an unnamed financial institution sometime soon, bankers everywhere started quaking in their hand-made shoes, according to The Economist. And businesses were struck by an alarming thought: even if this threat proves empty, commercial secrets are no longer safe.

Smaller leaks are nothing new in the corporate world. In September 2009 Wikileaks posted a leaked internal report from Trafigura, a commodities giant, discussing a hazardous waste spill in Côte d’Ivoire. In January 2008 the site released stolen documents from Julius Baer, a Swiss bank, including bank records of about 1,600 clients with accounts at a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands. The bank sued to stop WikiLeaks publishing the documents, but then dropped the suit.

The worry for companies is that their files are insecure. Constantly improving technology has led to an explosion of corporate data. It has also made it more vulnerable: employees increasingly bring their own storage devices to work. Even the simplest can store the equivalent of several tonnes of paper. And more and more people use social networks at work, which thrive on exchanging information. Worse, many firms do not have the right policies in place to deal with these changes. More than half in America and Britain do not have a “data map”, a document describing what information is being stored and who has access to it, according to one study.

Spies have learned what the music and film industries learned long ago: that digital files are easy to copy and distribute. Companies are about to make that discovery, too. There will be more leaks, and it’s likely that they will be embarrassing.