Startup Searches China's Internet for Signs of Intellectual Property Theft

Strider Technologies scours open-source data in China to identify technologies most at risk of being stolen -- and the people who might be tempted to steal them. China's government calls IP theft allegations 'malicious slandering.' From a report: Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has for decades been a hotbed of US nuclear experimentation. It's also a target for countries seeking to steal American secrets. More than 1,700 technologies developed in the lab are in China's crosshairs, according to three-year-old startup Strider Technologies. The list includes ion beams, nuclear power equipment and energy storage materials. Using custom software to scour widely available sources of information on China's internet, Strider executives said they identified two postdoctoral researchers in nanotechnology who, while working at Oak Ridge, were recruited into China's Youth Thousand Talents Program. The researchers were lured by perks including a grant of 500,000 yuan (about $75,000) apiece and other subsidies worth up to 3 million yuan (about $450,000), the executives said. Both relocated to China and are now employed by university labs with ties to China's defense industry, they said. This is the potential power of Strider, which uses open-source data from China to identify technologies most at risk of being stolen -- and to spot the people who might be tempted to steal them. The company's pitch coincides with a debate in the US over how to investigate Chinese industrial espionage while protecting civil liberties, and follows a decision by the Justice Department to shut down a program targeting crimes involving China amid allegations that the agency was targeting people based on their ethnicity. The brainchild of globetrotting American twin brothers, Strider, which is based in suburban Salt Lake City, used Oak Ridge only as an example of its prowess; the lab isn't a client. "Companies around the world have been dealing with nation-state threats and IP theft for a decade or more, with little to no tools," said Eric Levesque, Strider's chief operating officer. "Governments can't solve for this and there is huge unmet demand in the market. We're enabling companies to get ahead of the threat rather than just react to issues post-incident."

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