What goes on in the mind of a white collar criminal? Why does a successful lawyer cheat clients out of millions of dollars?

Over the years I’ve run into expert witnesses and attorneys who have told me about software copyright infringement cases where the only clues that copying occurred were patterns of spaces and tabs (“whitespace”). We set out to rigorously test this method.

Forrester Consulting just put out a report that I found interesting. According to Forrester, chief information security officers (CISOs) face increasing demands from their business units, regulators, and business partners to safeguard their information assets. Security programs protect two types of data: secrets that confer long-term competitive advantage and custodial data assets that they are compelled to protect. Secrets include product plans, earnings forecasts, and trade secrets; custodial data includes customer, medical, and payment card information that becomes “toxic” when spilled or stolen. Forrester found that enterprises are overly focused on compliance and not focused enough on protecting their secrets.

SAFE Corporation is looking for partners in academia and industry to create a database of purposely plagiarized code to be known as the Depository of Universal Plagiarism Examples or DUPE. Plagiarism detection programs would be run on DUPE to determine which programs best detected copying. Statistics about plagiarized code would be gathered in order to improve the plagiarism detection programs.

If you have a research idea relating to code analysis, and you can use the SAFE tools, let us know. If your proposal passes our review process you’ll get free licenses to our tools, free support, and help getting your results published.

More confirmation that IP theft is hurting businesses. In this issue I discuss the report from the Ponemon Institute that echoes those numbers and gives some interesting (perhaps scary) statistics.