On June 14, 2016, Jiaqiang Xu was charged in the Southern\u00a0District of New York in a six-count superseding indictment with economic espionage and theft of trade\u00a0secrets, in connection with Xu\u2019s theft of proprietary source code from his former employer, with the\u00a0intent to benefit the National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People\u2019s Republic of China.\u00a0On May 19, 2017, Xu pleaded guilty to the indictment, and is to be sentenced in January 2018. Xu was\u00a0initially arrested by the FBI on Dec. 7, 2015, and subsequently charged on Jan. 6, 2016, by indictment\u00a0with one count of theft of trade secrets. According to court documents, from Nov. 2010, to May 2014, Xu\u00a0worked as a developer for a particular U.S. company (the \u201cVictim Company\u201d). As a developer, Xu\u00a0enjoyed access to certain proprietary software (the \u201cProprietary Software\u201d), as well as that software\u2019s\u00a0underlying source code (the \u201cProprietary Source Code\u201d). The Proprietary Software is a clustered file\u00a0system developed and marketed by the Victim Company in the U.S. and other countries. A clustered file\u00a0system facilitates faster computer performance by coordinating work among multiple servers. The Victim\u00a0Company takes significant precautions to protect the Proprietary Source Code as a trade secret. The\u00a0Victim Company takes these precautions in part because the Proprietary Software and the Proprietary\u00a0Source Code are economically valuable, which value depends in part on the Proprietary Source Code\u2019s\u00a0secrecy. In May 2014, Xu voluntarily resigned from the Victim Company. Xu subsequently, in a series\u00a0of communication with UC agents, uploaded Victim Company\u2019s Proprietary Source Code to the UC\u2019s\u00a0computer network. On Dec. 7, 2015, Xu met with UC-2 at a hotel in White Plains, New York (the Hotel).\u00a0Xu stated, in sum and substance, that Xu had used the Proprietary Source Code to make software to sell to\u00a0customers, that Xu knew the Proprietary Source Code to be the product of decades of work on the part of\u00a0the Victim Company, and that Xu had used the Proprietary Source Code to build a copy of the Proprietary\u00a0Software, which Xu had uploaded and installed on the UC Network (i.e., the Xu Upload). Xu also\u00a0indicated that Xu knew the copy of the Proprietary Software that Xu had installed on the UC Network\u00a0contained information identifying the Proprietary Software as the Victim Company\u2019s property, which\u00a0could reveal the fact that the Proprietary Software had been built with the Proprietary Source Code\u00a0without the Victim Company\u2019s authorization. Xu told UC-2 that Xu could take steps to prevent detection\u00a0of the Proprietary Software\u2019s origins \u2013 i.e., that it had been built with stolen Proprietary Source Code \u2013\u00a0including writing computer scripts that would modify the Proprietary Source Code to conceal its origins.\u00a0Later on Dec. 7, 2015, Xu met with UC-1 and UC-2 at the Hotel. During that meeting, Xu showed UC-2 a\u00a0copy of what Xu represented to be the Proprietary Source Code on Xu\u2019s laptop. Xu noted to UC-2 a\u00a0portion of the code that indicated it originated with the Victim Company as well as the date on which it\u00a0had been copyrighted. Xu also stated that Xu had previously modified the Proprietary Source Code\u2019s\u00a0command interface to conceal the fact that the Proprietary Source Code originated with the Victim\u00a0Company and identified multiple specific customers to whom Xu had previously provided the Proprietary\u00a0Software using Xu\u2019s stolen copy of the Proprietary Source Code. This case was investigated by the FBI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Theft of Valuable Source Code for ChinaOn June 14, 2016, Jiaqiang Xu was charged in the Southern\u00a0District of New York in a six-count superseding indictment with economic espionage and theft […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nsd201801"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3899,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions\/3899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}