7 Essential Practices to Prevent Intellectual Property Theft

Original ideas, inventions, and trade secrets drive your organization’s value and competitive advantage. Yet as market competition grows, so does the risk of intellectual property (IP) theft and leaks. Intellectual property protection requires implementing comprehensive security measures and policies.

In this article, we explain what IP theft is, why it happens, and how to prevent intellectual property theft with seven proven practices and the right cybersecurity tools.

Key takeaways

• Most IP breaches stem from hacking, insider privilege abuse, and human error, meaning even a single employee or contractor can expose critical IP in seconds.
• The impact of IP theft is severe: loss of competitive advantage, financial damage, reputational fallout, and stalled business growth. 
• In the US alone, IP losses are estimated at $600 billion annually.
• Protecting IP is critical to preserve your organization’s market position, competitive advantage, and customer trust. 
• You can secure your IP effectively only when every layer — people, policies, and cybersecurity tools — works in sync.

Why protect intellectual property?

Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that refers to creations of the mind, including inventions, technical innovations, artistic works, designs, marketing strategies, images, videos, and symbols. Both individuals and businesses can be IP owners.

The legal right to claim ideas and creations as intellectual property helps IP owners benefit from their work, protect it, and prevent copying. The concept of intellectual property helps stimulate innovation and contributes to progress in economics, technology, science, art, and other fields.

Intellectual property traditionally includes assets that are protected through regulatory methods such as patents, copyrights and regulatory licenses; however, this protection is being expanded to include software and business processes when these can be demonstrated to be original, novel and non-obvious.

Gartner.

To claim IP ownership, individuals and businesses establish intellectual property rights (IPRs) through copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. IPRs enable creators to earn recognition and benefit from their products as well as to profit when others use their creations and inventions. However, without proper protection, businesses risk losing ownership of their work and expose themselves to copycats.

Benefits of protecting intellectual property for businesses

Protecting your intellectual property is essential not only for preventing theft — it’s also about preserving the core value of your business. Key reasons to invest in strong IP protection include:

Preserve competitive advantage

Your IP represents the unique innovations, processes, and creative works that differentiate your business from competitors. If you fail to protect these assets, rivals might replicate your products and try to push your company out of the market.

Prevent financial loss

Intellectual property theft can directly erode your profits and R&D investments. It’s estimated that IP theft costs companies hundreds of billions of dollars collectively each year. Losing exclusive rights to a product or process means losing the returns on your innovation. 

Protect operational continuity

When IP theft occurs, the impacts ripple throughout the entire organization. While you are focused on investigating the incidents and implementing remediation measures, you may face operational disruptions and, most likely, delays in production.

Maintain brand reputation and customer trust

When your designs or ideas are stolen and misused, it can damage your brand’s reputation. Intellectual property protection ensures brand integrity — customers and partners not only know that your offerings are unique but also understand that you can protect their data with the same level of security and respect.

What is intellectual property theft?

Intellectual property theft is the act of robbing people or organizations of their ideas, inventions, creative products, and other types of IP. The impact of intellectual property theft on businesses includes loss of a competitive edge, reputational damage, slowed business growth, etc.

Theft of intellectual property may result in significant losses for organizations and can add up to substantial sums at a country-wide level. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimates that the annual costs from IP losses in the US are $600 billion.

Furthermore, if a cybersecurity breach affects the sensitive data of customers, employees, and partners, your organization can face compliance and legal issues. Thus, you may end up spending most of your efforts and resources on lawsuits rather than further business growth.

IP thieves range from disgruntled employees and contractors to business competitors and state-sponsored hackers who phish their way into your network for stealing IP. 

By stealing intellectual property or buying stolen ideas, dishonest parties looking to jump-start their own products can do so more quickly and cheaply than if they are forced to develop originals. Meanwhile, the rightful owner is left competing with knock-off versions of their own innovation, which is often sold at a fraction of the original price. The bottom line is that dealing with stolen IP is a long and expensive process, so organizations must be proactive in preventing IP theft before it happens.

Common methods of intellectual property theft

These are the most common ways attackers steal intellectual property: 

Hacking

Cybercriminals can gain unauthorized access to an organization’s sensitive data and intellectual property using various phishing techniques. A large portion of IP theft is enabled by malware infiltration, including by state-sponsored attackers.

For instance, attackers can use keyloggers — malicious software that captures data as users type it into a system. Or they can inject man-in-the-browser malware into a browser to view and capture everything the user enters or sees on a web page or in an application. Another way to gain access to IP data is through cross-site scripting attacks or injecting malicious objects into web pages, also known as drive-by downloads.

Privilege abuse

Not all IP thieves are outsiders. Insiders, such as employees, contractors, or business partners, may exploit their access to your organization’s sensitive data and intellectual property to steal it with the intent to sell it to competitors or use it to start their own businesses. Former employees pose an additional risk, as they may still have access to corporate networks. Ex-employees can also create backdoor accounts to steal data.

Among the most notorious examples of intellectual property theft by an insider was the Apple Watch IP theft. 

Other notable intellectual property theft cases include:

• Valeo’s ADAS source code theft, where an ex-employee copied proprietary ADAS code to a personal device shortly before leaving the company.
• Google AI trade secrets theft, where an employee misused their access to copy restricted files from Google’s repositories and transferred them to China-based AI startups.

The higher the level of user access rights, the higher the risk of IP theft. Therefore, you must always keep an eye on privileged users and third parties. 

Exploiting human error and negligence

Employee-caused IP data breaches are not always malicious by intent. 20% of cybersecurity incidents involve negligent employees or contractors who get outsmarted by attackers, according to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute. The costs of such incidents total an average of $4.8 million per year per organization.

Employees often make mistakes due to carelessness, lack of cybersecurity awareness, or fatigue. And once a data breach occurs, it can expose various types of confidential information, including IP.

Employees often expose sensitive information by clicking on phishing links and attachments that introduce malware or by neglecting company security policies (e.g., using weak passwords or insecure networks).

Whether an IP breach is caused by a targeted or untargeted cyberattack, dealing with the consequences of stolen IP is a long, expensive, and exhausting process. Organizations must conclusively prove IP theft and expend significant effort and money on lawsuits. Even if they win, the legal wrangling may take years.

Let’s now explore cybersecurity best practices for businesses that help prevent IP loss.

7 best practices to prevent intellectual property theft

How do you protect your intellectual property?

Securing your IP means ensuring the protection of sensitive data within your corporate IT environment and physical spaces (securely storing printed and signed contracts, for example).

In this article, we focus on securing IP in the digital space. Let’s explore in detail how that can be done:

1. Identify your most valuable data

You can’t protect what you don’t know exists. To avoid intellectual property theft, first take an inventory of your IP assets. This may involve conducting regular IP audits to catalog your trade secrets, proprietary research, designs, source code, and other corporate information.

Make sure all employees clearly understand what data counts as the company’s intellectual property and why they need to handle it carefully. To do that, ensure communication between executives and all departments (HR, marketing, sales, R&D, etc.), so everyone is aware of the importance of IP and can adequately identify and protect it.

Identifying your IP is crucial; otherwise, you can’t implement the proper policies and procedures to secure it. When determining where your organization’s IP is located, focus on the following assets:

• Cloud applications and file sharing services.
• Corporate networks, servers, and storage drives.
• Employees’ personal devices.
• Third-party systems and applications.

2. Establish a data security policy

A strong data security policy ensures the protection of corporate assets and sensitive data, including intellectual property, by setting rules that your employees should follow.

To make sure your data security policy is comprehensive and efficient, include the following information:

• Password management rules, including restrictions for reusing passwords across platforms.
• Clear rules on privacy settings for mobile applications and online accounts.
• Information related to your bring-your-own-device policy.
• Information about employee accountability for the use of sensitive data.
• Security rules for working with corporate systems, networks, and other accounts.
• Rules related to downloading and installing software.
• Incident reporting protocols.

Once your policy is in place, train all staff on it and enforce it with consistency. Update the policy periodically to cover new threats or changes in technology. 

3. Eliminate cybersecurity gaps and weak spots

It’s highly recommended to regularly check your cybersecurity for gaps. The idea here is to think like an attacker by identifying what they would want to target first and securing those areas.

A proven tactic to find weak spots in your cybersecurity is to conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment. This evaluation helps you identify which information and assets could be compromised by a cyberattacker and determine various risks to those assets. Apart from intellectual property, you should also assess the security of your hardware, networks, corporate devices, and customer and employee data.

Once you’ve identified cybersecurity gaps and weak spots, take measures to fix them and avoid potential flaws down the road. For instance, you should make sure all your operating systems and software remain up to date and enable automatic software updates wherever possible.

4. Minimize access to IP

One of the most effective ways to prevent intellectual property theft is to minimize access to sensitive systems, applications, and data. Start by enforcing the principle of least privilege, ensuring each user only has the access required to perform their specific tasks and nothing more. 

Administrative rights should be limited to a small, clearly defined group of users, and elevated privileges should be granted only on demand and for a limited time as per the just-in-time approach to PAM. This approach significantly reduces your potential attack surface, making it more difficult for malicious insiders or external hackers to access your intellectual property.

Equally important is visibility into how employees use privileged accounts and interact with sensitive data. Regularly rotate credentials to prevent password reuse or standing admin access. Adopt access request workflows for sensitive resources by requiring users to justify and receive approval before connecting to systems containing trade secrets or other sensitive data. 

5. Regularly review user access

A periodic review of user access to sensitive data is a crucial practice for reducing the risk of privilege abuse and security breaches. It lets you re-evaluate user roles, access rights and privileges, and user credentials.

Pay special attention to accounts of users who have left the organization. For example, if an engineer retires or switches departments and no longer works on a product that involves trade secrets, revoke their access to prevent insider threats. 

6. Monitor employee activity

“Trust but verify” is an essential component of IP security. Implementing continuous employee monitoring helps ensure that all users are working within the bounds of security policies. By monitoring user activity in real time, you can identify patterns that signal potential data misuse. 

When employees know that their actions are being monitored, they tend to stick to recommended cybersecurity practices, such as avoiding visiting shady websites that can lead to malware downloads and data breaches. In the event of IP theft, records of user activity monitoring can help speed up the investigation process, lessening the impact of an attack.

Alerts on suspicious activity are a crucial part of this proactive approach. Configurable alerts ensure security teams are notified immediately when risky behavior occurs. If, for example, someone is found accessing IP repositories outside business hours, inserting unauthorized USB devices, or launching unapproved applications, you should receive an immediate notification. 

By maintaining visibility paired with smart alerting, your organization can move from passive monitoring to active prevention of IP theft.

7. Educate employees

Your employees can be either your weakest link or your first line of defense when it comes to IP theft prevention. That’s why it’s extremely important to educate them on the value of your company’s IP and the proper procedures for handling it. By doing so, you have a better chance of preventing accidental data leaks.

Cybersecurity awareness among employees has become even more relevant with the shift to remote work and hybrid office environments. As a result of this trend, taking a people-centric approach to security has become popular once again, prompting businesses to put their people at the forefront of their defense. A people-centric approach prioritizes providing employees with relevant cybersecurity education and showing workers that the organization trusts them rather than emphasizing restrictive security controls.

To ensure cybersecurity awareness, there are several approaches you can try or combine, including the following:

• Regular security training sessions: Conduct workshops on topics like data classification, safe data handling, and company security policies.
  
• Phishing simulations: Periodically test employees with simulated phishing emails to teach them how to recognize and report social engineering attacks. Follow up with additional training for anyone who falls for the simulated attack.
  
• Clear guidelines and reminders: Provide quick-reference guides on using approved cloud services or the proper methods for sharing documents.

Foster an environment where employees feel comfortable reporting potential security issues or mistakes immediately, without fear of punishment. 

How Syteca helps prevent IP theft

Preventing intellectual property theft requires complete control over privileged access and real-time visibility into what’s happening across your systems.

Syteca is a robust privileged access management (PAM) platform with identity threat detection and response (ITDR) capabilities, helping organizations protect their trade secrets, designs, and sensitive data before it ends up in the wrong hands.

Privileged access management (PAM)

Syteca PAM ensures strict control over who can access your most sensitive systems, enabling you to enforce the principle of least privilege and grant permissions only when necessary. 

Identity threat detection and response (ITDR)

While PAM prevents unauthorized access, ITDR detects misuse after the access is granted.

Ultimately, Syteca creates a closed security loop where every privileged action is approved, monitored, and fully traceable.

Protect your innovations. Secure your competitive edge.

IP is what makes your business unique, but unfortunately, cybercriminals and malicious insiders heavily target corporate property because it can be quickly monetized. 

By implementing the best practices outlined above, you can protect your intellectual property against theft and disclosure. To ensure that these practices are truly effective, you need visibility, control, and accountability. That’s exactly what Syteca offers with its powerful PAM and ITDR capabilities — all in one platform.