An IT engineer in Caterpillar's engineering design
centre in India has been arrested on suspicion of stealing 4,000
confidential documents from the company's server in the
US.
The former employee is said to have used another employee's
username and password to access and steal the documents. He was
arrested by India's Cyber Crime Cell team while working at another
company.
He has been charged with hacking offences. The employee had
worked at Caterpillar's design centre in Chennai.
The documents said to have been illegally downloaded at the
beginning of the year were on a server located in Illinois.
The man was working at another firm located near Bangalore at
the time of his arrest.
The case will do nothing to calm fears that outsourcing
operations to offshore centres in poor countries can encourage data
theft for financial gain.
Last year, the media exposed a number of alleged data thefts
from Indian customer service centres serving British firms.