Fergie's Tech Blog

Boeing Employee Charged With Stealing 320,000 Sensitive Files

Sharon Gaudin writes on InformationWeek:

A disgruntled Boeing employee was charged Tuesday with 16 counts of computer trespass for allegedly stealing more than 320,000 company files over the course of more than two years and leaking them to The Seattle Times.

Gerald Lee Eastman, who was a quality assurance inspector at Boeing at the time of the thefts, is slated to be arraigned on July 17, according to a spokesman for the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office. He faces up to 57 months in prison if convicted on all counts.

According to a criminal complaint, a search of Eastman's home found computers and storage devices containing more than 320,000 pages of "very sensitive" documents related to Boeing's business operations. Boeing estimated in an arrest report that if only a portion of the stolen documents were given to competitors, it could cost the company between $5 billion and $15 billion.

Eastman used what prosecutors called his "unfettered access to Boeing systems" to download large amounts of data from information stores he had no legitimate reason for accessing, according to the criminal complaint. He allegedly transferred the information to a thumb drive and then removed it from company property.

posted by Fergie @ 7/11/2007 03:40:00 PM