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Akamai Employee Tried To Sell Secrets To Israel

Posted by Soulskill on from the nobody-does-it-like-nedry dept.

CWmike writes "A 43-year-old former Akamai employee has pleaded guilty to espionage charges after offering to hand over confidential information about the Web acceleration company to an agent posing as an Israeli consular official in Boston. Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai's clients and contracts, information about the company's security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses. Doxer delivered the information to a dead drop box 62 times. His motivation: To help Israel and to get information on his son and estranged wife, who lived outside the U.S., prosecutors said in court filings. Doxer faces 15 years in prison on the charges."

6 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Tumbled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1) Find a an exploitable employee
    2) Seduce them with hopes of seeing their child again this century
    3) Collect incriminating evidence
    4) Profit!

    They'd be hard pressed to get a conviction out of me if they set this guy up. If he instigated this then I'll still be disinclined to convict as they could have smacked him down and gotten a felony.

    So this wasteful agent spent how much time and how many millions of dollars building up this whoop de do case? Maybe they could have nailed the guy with the simple felony, got a plea, destroyed their career saved us some tax dollars to be used hunting real criminals and not distraught fathers.

    1. Re:Tumbled by Jurramonga · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seems it would have been easier (and cheaper) to just help the guy get some information on his family. Less likely to get you a promotion, I suppose...

    2. Re:Tumbled by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      FWIW he wasn't trying to profit.

      It's not about his profit.

      It's about the fact that the world would end in a fiery wreck if anyone should get faster video over the internet without paying license fees.

      We're talking profits here, man. What is the worth of a man's family in the face of lost shareholder value? Get your priorities straight!

      I'm telling you this as a friend.

      Plus, Akamai is an important part of the coming private Internet which is coming to replace the messy public internet. Don't you want a safer, more orderly Internet? And if Akamai's technology makes the new private Internet a "safer, speedier Internet" (as their marketing material says), obviously we can't have that technology falling into non-license paying hands. How can you have a "safer, speedier Internet" if a lot of people have access to technology that makes it "safer" and "speedier". That would be socialism, and you don't want socialism do you? Or do you, you filthy socialist? How would you like it if your family and employer found out that you were a filthy socialist who doesn't want a "safer, speedier Internet"? You wouldn't want that to happen. Bad things happen to filthy socialists who don't want a "safer, speedier Internet".

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  2. Akamai Is An Expensive Waste of Electricity by curmudgeon99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For several years I worked in Manhattan for one of those large privately held media Companies, one with both magazines and magazine websites galore, including ones you would know. We used to use Akamai. Sure they could cache our content and then absorb a lot of traffic from our servers, but they were expensive as hell--especially for what they did, in my opinion. I do seem to recall that our big company eventually dumped Akamai and all the money that went with it. Why they still exist I will never know.

  3. Anyone else worried that this was a criminal case? by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Uniform Trade Secrets Act makes trade secret "theft" a civil matter between the secret holder and the leaker. Apparently something went through in 1996 making it a Federal crime. The economy went fine for hundreds of years without the threat of jail for leakers -- why change? Especially since trade secret law can be and has been abused.

    On another subject, there's a gaping gap in the story as we've seen it. How did the FBI know about his email to the Israeli consulate? Why did it take years before they followed up?

  4. Re:Where have you been? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You are spot on. I deal with many CDN's and what I once admired about Akamai has now become a basic service.

    That all said Akamai holds a special place in my heart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_M._Lewin