Intel Sues Ex-Engineer for Stealing 18,000 ‘Prime Secret’ Information – Hackread – Cybersecurity Information, Information Breaches, Tech, AI, Crypto and Extra

Intel, the main pc chip maker, has filed a lawsuit looking for a minimum of $250,000 in damages from a former software program engineer, Jinfeng Luo, who’s accused of stealing an enormous quantity of confidential firm information earlier than disappearing.

This incident comes as Intel faces huge job cuts. The corporate, as we all know it, has laid off round 35,500 staff during the last couple of years because it tries to repair its cash troubles.

Luo, who had labored at Intel since 2014, was notified on July 7, 2024, that his job was ending on the finish of that month. In accordance with courtroom filings reported by media retailers, simply days earlier than his final day, Luo allegedly copied about 18,000 recordsdata onto a Community-Hooked up Storage (NAS) gadget. A NAS is mainly a particular exhausting drive related to a community, making it attainable to retailer and share information.

These recordsdata weren’t simply any paperwork; some have been even marked as “Intel Prime Secret,” which suggests they contained the corporate’s most delicate info. Nevertheless, whereas Luo was notified of his termination amid these layoffs, the lawsuit itself doesn’t state the precise motive why his job was ended.

Additional probing revealed that Luo first tried to repeat the recordsdata to an exterior drive per week earlier than his departure, however Intel’s safety techniques blocked that try. He reportedly succeeded within the switch a number of days later, earlier than spending the remainder of his time downloading as a lot info as he might.

Intel detected the bizarre transfers and has since spent over three months attempting to contact Luo via telephone calls, emails, and even letters. Nevertheless, with the previous worker nonetheless untraceable and never responding to any of the claims, Intel was compelled to file the lawsuit in a Washington federal courtroom.

The corporate is looking for the return of its property and can also be demanding that the courtroom order Luo handy over his private digital gadgets for inspection. The case is formally titled Intel Company v. Luo, with Case Quantity 2:2025cv02159.

It’s price noting that this isn’t Intel’s first conflict with a former worker stealing information. In a latest, separate case, one other former engineer named Varun Gupta was sentenced to 2 years of probation and needed to pay a $34,000 high-quality for taking proprietary info. That information was later used whereas he labored for Microsoft, which, the courtroom discovered, truly gave the rival firm a bonus in negotiations with Intel.

Intel’s lawsuit towards Luo seeks the return of all of the confidential information and the big sum of cash for damages, as the corporate fights to guard its enterprise secrets and techniques.