Akamai Employee Tried To Sell Secrets To Israel

CWmike writes "A 43-year-old former Akamai employee has pleaded guilty to espionage charges after offering to hand over confidential information about the Web acceleration company to an agent posing as an Israeli consular official in Boston. Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai's clients and contracts, information about the company's security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses. Doxer delivered the information to a dead drop box 62 times. His motivation: To help Israel and to get information on his son and estranged wife, who lived outside the U.S., prosecutors said in court filings. Doxer faces 15 years in prison on the charges."

Re:Akamai Is An Expensive Waste of Electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

If not for Akamai, we'd need 3x the number of servers. Probably more considering certain things that don't scale linearly. That's space, cooling and power. Possibly more employees to manager the extra servers.

Set up our own CDN? There's no way we could match the extensive network of edge servers Akamai has. And again, we'd have to employ people to make it work and manage these extra servers. Accountants too to pay all the different DC operators.

We get some security as well. Our name servers can hide and Akamai can front any DoS attempts. Additionally, if we so choose (I believe) we could restrict access to our servers to -only- Akamai.

Routing "strangeness" happens on the internet more often than you'd (well, I'd) think. With our local ISPs, we shrug our shoulders. Akamai it either doesn't happen, or in the rare case when it does, they "fix" it. "People from Singapore say our site is down" just doesn't happen anymore.

No doubt, it's expensive (REALLY expensive), but it's oh-so-nice to sit behind Akamai and deal with problems that don't involve stupid amounts of traffic.

Re:utter, complete hypocritical bullshit

[Kreigaffe]

Is it? Is it really? Do you know this?

I sure don't. I don't know that farming in China is worse than living in "corporate cities". It could be worse.

It could be better, but only because of social policies enacted by the Chinese government to ensure that they have a large population of workers desperate enough to take any work they can, a virtual slave class who are not allowed freedom of travel, who very well could have led a more happy and healthy and stable life as simple subsistence farmers. Of course, that wouldn't be as good for The State, so it's discouraged.

Don't ever underestimate the evil of the Chinese government. Their population, to them, is not people but a resource. Look at their treatment of other resources and you will see how they will treat their people-resource. Its only value is to be exploited as harshly as possible for the benefit of the State.

Re:utter, complete hypocritical bullshit

[afidel]

Having worked on both a farm and in a factory for just above minimum wage, hell yeah factory work is a hell of a lot better, and I was on a midsized US farm with tons of machinery to help me out, not doing everything with hand tools. A week of doubles running a machine is still easier than working nearly as many hours doing manual labor.

18 months? 62 drops?

[hrtserpent6]

A guy tries to sell inside corporate information to Israel in exchange for $3,000 and information on his ex-wife and son. The FBI gets involved, and they set up a sting operation. The guy then proceeds to provide some fairly weak-sauce information: client lists, contracts and employee information. The whole ordeal is clumsy and sad.

How it should have happened:
After a few transactions, the FBI realizes this guy is zero threat. They refer the case to the Massachusetts Attorney General "for further joint investigation". Based on the evidence, the AG charges the guy with larceny or embezzlement or whatever, Akamai takes their civil remedies for breach of contract, etc, and the FBI declines to prosecute. The guy loses his job, pays $150K in fines and does 6 months in minimum security + probation. His life gets pretty hard.

How it actually happened:
After a few transactions, the FBI realizes the information sucks. No source code, no proprietary technology, no M&A data, no insider-level financials. It's client lists, contracts and internal employee information. The information is so weak, they can't even charge him with anything under existing Federal statutes. But there's a foreign government involved, so all sense of proportion is lost. They keep asking the guy for more information. And more. 18 months and 62 transactions later, they finally get to a point where:

• a) they get one or more specific pieces of information that qualify as 'trade secrets'
• b) the data in aggregate can qualify as 'trade secrets'

Now they can charge him under the Economic Espionage Act and prepare to drop him in a very deep, very dark hole. Slam dunk. Promotions all around for stopping a 'grave threat to U.S. economic security'. The guy loses his job, pays $400K in fines and goes to Federal prison for 10 years. His life is over.

Insane.

Re:Akamai Is An Expensive Waste of Electricity

[Alomex]

CNN dumped Akamai on September 10, 2001, for the exact same reasons as you list above. I kid you not.

They signed back up on September 12, 2001.