Engineer Found Guilty for Stealing Navy Secrets via Dropbox Account

A jury trial found a former engineer at a Navy contractor guilty of stealing trade secrets regarding Navy projects by uploading the files to his personal Dropbox account. The man, Jared Dylan Sparks, 35, of Ardmore, Oklahoma, worked as an electrical engineer for LBI, Inc., a company authorized to build unmanned underwater vehicles (drones) for the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research, and weather data-gathering buoys for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Sparks worked for LBI from January 2010 to December 2011, when he left for a similar position at Charles Rivers Analytics (CRA), another Navy contractor.

According to an indictment obtained by Bleeping Computer, LBI accused Sparks of uploading over 5,000 files containing information about LBI’s work on Navy contractors to his personal Dropbox account, right before he quit his job in December 2011. Some files he sent via email. The files included data on LBI’s accounting and engineering projects, but also photographs of designs and AutoCAD and SolidWorks renderings used to build LBI’s unmanned underwater vehicles and buoys.

Source: bleepingcomputer.com