What just happened? Intel has filed a $250,000 lawsuit against a former software engineer over allegations that he stole thousands of sensitive files from the company just before he was laid off after 10+ years of service. One item he downloaded was labeled as "Intel Top Secret," which sounds concerning for Team Blue. However, the person in question cannot be located.
Jinfeng Luo, who started at Intel in 2014, was one of the 35,000 employees who lost their job at the company as part of extensive ongoing cost-cutting measures implemented in recent years.
Luo received a termination notice on July 7, with Intel ending his employment on July 31, reports Oregon Live. But it seems the disgruntled worker wasn't going to just walk out the door empty-handed.
Intel claims that on July 23, a week before he was due to leave the company, Luo attempted to download a file from his work laptop onto an external storage drive. Intel's system protections prevented the download, but Luo decided he would try again.
Three days before he left, Luo did manage to transfer laptop files to a NAS. The company claims that he downloaded 18,000 files during his final days at Intel. The trove included confidential company data, some of which was labeled as "Intel Top Secret."
The transfer was detected by Intel, prompting an investigation. The company has since spent months trying to reach Luo by phone and email. It also sent letters to his home in Seattle and two other addresses associated with him, including one in Portland, but Luo never responded.
Out of options, Intel filed a lawsuit against its former worker. It is seeking at least $250,000 in damages, attorney fees, and a court order preventing him from disclosing any confidential information. It also wants all the stolen data returned, of course.
This isn't new ground for Intel. Back in 2021, it launched a lawsuit against a product marketing engineer who had worker for the company for ten years before leaving to join Microsoft. The suit alleged that he transferred 3,900 documents, including some related to Intel's Xeon CPUs, onto two USB drives on his last day, accessing them later using his Microsoft-issued laptop. He was recently fined $34,000 and sentence to two years' probation.
Intel sues former engineer accused of stealing 18,000 files labeled "top secret"
