Foreign IT Workers Are A Security And Economic Risk: Foreign IBM Employee Steals Proprietary Source Code...

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, the Department of Justice said. Xu Jiaqiang is alleged to have committed the crimes for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.

The charges against Xu highlight the security and intellectual property risks faced by U.S. companies with operations in other countries and companies that employ imported foreign workers at home.

Xu, who was initially arrested by the FBI in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in federal court in New York, the DOJ said.

The company whose source code Xu is alleged to have stolen was not named in court filings or in the DOJ statement, but a Reuters report said he was employed by IBM.

LinkedIn lists a developer with the same name as employed with IBM in China around the same period. The company has 2,300 developers located in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei at its China Development Lab (CDL) that was founded in 1999.

IBM could not be immediately reached for comment.

Xu worked as a developer for the U.S. company’s branch in China from November 2010 to May 2014. He had full access to proprietary source code, including the ability to download it to a computer or storage device, according to the original...

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