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The conviction of Ahmad Abouammo, formerly an employee of Twitter for accepting bribes from a Saudi Arabian to obtain and reveal information about the owners of Twitter accounts regarded as dissident in the Kingdom provides a reminder that, despite the political focus on the activities of Russia and China, industrial espionage is a global problem that goes well beyond politics.

The case is interesting because he was convicted not of industrial espionage but of convicted of acting as a foreign agent without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, international money laundering and falsification of records. Ahmad Abouammo worked for Twitter in the USA in its Middle East North Africa division.

LastPass says on its website that 80% of data security breaches are due to a password coming into the hands of intruders. It also says that its own servers have been breached and that the password vaults of its customers downloaded.

In 2013, the Washington Post reported that top secret military designs were stolen by hackers. Other reports blamed "China." In 2020, it was widely reported that hackers had stolen huge amounts of design data from computer chip maker Intel. In October 2022, Binance reported that USD570 million, at then prices, worth of cryptocurrencies by someone who faked smart contracts, causing panic amongst companies operating a "bridge" between services.

In 2020, an employee of US Treasury Department FinCEN, who had been vetted for security clearance, unlawfully (we should say "illegally") downloaded thousands of pages of data relating to suspicious activity reports filed by financial institutions, walked out of the office with them and released them to the media.

Data security is a far from trivial matter. Increasingly, certain classes of commerce and industry are required, as a condition of their licensing, to put in place measures to prevent unauthorised access to computer systems and the data they hold and process. And, of course, to control systems.

It's a never-ending battle on a field that is constantly expanding.

And while we tend to think of illegal or unlawful access to computer systems as an external threat, the threat of unlawful access by persons who are authorised to use computer systems is at least as large with the USB being a favoured device for both data theft and sabotage.

Financial Services businesses, law firms, accounting practices and, of course, medical records are extremely valuable but valuable information is stored by all manner of businesses such as on-line shopping platforms.

The software that controls mission-critical systems are subject to attack from outside and from those who, by some means, gain access to a connected computer from where they can run rogue software or take control of the system.