This incident involves two of the biggest tech players: Google and Uber. In 2015, a lead engineer at Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, left the company to start his own self-driving truck venture, Otto.
But, before departing, he exfiltrated several trade secrets including diagrams and drawings related to simulations, radar technology, source code snippets, PDFs marked as confidential, and videos of test drives.
How? By downloading 14,000 files onto his laptop directly from Google servers. Otto was acquired by Uber after a few months, at which point Google executives discovered the breach.
In the end, Waymo was awarded $245 million worth of Uber shares and, in March, the employee pleaded guilty.
