How to Prevent Intellectual Property Leakage

As businesses become more competitive, protecting your intellectual property becomes increasingly challenging. Creative ideas, inventions, and designs are now incredibly vulnerable to intellectual property leakage and theft. That’s why, in order to protect valuable information, you must implement various proactive security measures.  

So, in this article, we’ve compiled key strategies and security measures that can help you prevent intellectual property leakage and protect your company from cyber-attacks.

Understanding the Risks of Intellectual Property Leakage

Before we look at ways to prevent data leaks, it’s important to understand the potential consequences of these leaks. Some of these include:

1. Financial Losses: Once competitors and unauthorized individuals access your IP, they can use it to create similar products or services. This, in turn, results in lost sales, decreased market share, and litigation costs associated with IP infringement.
2. Reputational Damages: If a brand fails to guard sensitive information, it risks losing the confidence and trust of its customers. A damaged reputation leads to reduced sales, fewer business opportunities, and a lasting negative image.
3. Legal Consequences: It’s no surprise that intellectual property theft can result in lengthy legal battles. You might face lawsuits for negligence in protecting data and be required to pay sufficient damages.

Ways to Prevent Intellectual Property Leakage

Here are some intellectual property cyber security methods you can use to protect your company from IP leakage:

1. Identify the Most Valuable Data

The first step to preventing intellectual property leakage is to identify and locate IPs valuable to your business. Once you recognize what needs to be protected, you’ll be able to tailor suitable security measures for that information. Some measures involve limiting access to specific employees, encrypting data, etc.

The most common places where you can locate valuable IP include:

• Input/Output devices: Those that store processed information, like printers, scanners, fax machines, etc. 
• Cloud applications and file-sharing services: This applies to both company-managed systems and unauthorized services used by employees.
• Third-party systems: Systems often shared with business partners, suppliers, and customers.

2. Implement Security Measures

After locating and identifying valuable IPs, you can protect them with robust digital security measures. These measures usually safeguard against hacking attempts like malware and phishing, which are common causes of intellectual property leakage. In fact, 90% of data breaches are typically the result of phishing attacks.

There are a few security measures you can include, such as:

• Using unique, strong passwords for all company accounts and implementing multi-factor authentication.
• Using a VPN to create secure connections for remote access.
• Implementing WPA2 or WPA3 for company Wi-Fi networks. 
• Regularly updating software and security tools.

3. Perform Regular Security Audits

Another way you can prevent intellectual property leakage is by performing yearly security audits. These are basically comprehensive reviews of various aspects of your security, including policies, controls, processes, etc. With these inspections, you can identify any risks or vulnerabilities in the company’s IT systems. 

As a result, you’ll have more insights into which areas are vulnerable to attacks and what can be done to strengthen them. 

4. Educate Your Employees

It may not seem like it, but employees are extremely capable of threatening your intellectual property and bringing about leaks. In fact, a study found that employee mistakes cause 88% of data breach incidents. This is because employees aren’t educated on cybersecurity risks or how to safeguard sensitive information. 

To combat this issue, regular employee training sessions should be held. These sessions will educate employees on handling sensitive data, provide various intellectual property theft examples, and explain how to manage these threats.

Conclusion

Undergoing intellectual property leakage comes with various risks and drawbacks to your company. Fortunately, there are multiple approaches you can employ to mitigate these risks. Some include identifying your most valuable data and applying relevant security measures. Others involve educating your employees on cyber threats and performing regular security audits.