FTC Leaks Whole Foods Secrets: It Could Happen to You, Too
The Dallas Business Journal reports that Whole Foods is investigating a leak of proprietary information by the Federal Trade Commission regarding its pursuit of competitor Wild Oats. The FTC filed the documents electronically without redacting them properly, as part of its case to block the merger.
Print
The documents were downloaded by the Associated Press before the files were replaced with the properly sanitized versions. More details from the AP story here, including a scheme to drive up costs at Wal-Mart and a discussion of Whole Foods' competitive position against Wild Oats.
However much you like reading the juicy details about someone else's business plan, no one wants to see that kind of information leaked about their own company. We don't know yet what the impact of the leak will be on Whole Foods, whose CEO, John Mackey, is under investigation by the SEC because he dissed Wild Oats in some pseudonymous blog postings.
It's tempting to point a finger at incompetent bureaucrats here, but this looks like a simple mistake. Court officials fixed the problem quickly. But IT organizations should take note and examine their own policies for protecting proprietary data. As my colleague Stephanie Overby writes in her recent piece on the global threat to intellectual property, most of the time when sensitive data leaks it's by mistake. And most of the time, it's because the data itself isn't protected.
What could you do to prevent an incident like this from happening to you?
More on protecting your data: How You Can Fight Cybercrime
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
