The exact frequency is difficult to estimate, but what is calculable about foreign governments' theft of U.S. companies' data is cause for great concern: In 2016, for example, Google notified its users of 4,000 state-sponsored cyberattacks per month. And last month, a BAE Systems report found an increase in cyberattacks on financial institutions linked to nation-states.

But it's not just the financial services industry that is at risk. According to public indictments in various U.S. Department of Justice cases, dozens of industries—from aviation to health care to nuclear and telecommunications—are vulnerable, cybersecurity lawyers and experts told more than 100 lawyers gathered at Atlanta firm Taylor English Duma on Tuesday for the 2019 annual Value Challenge conference held by the Georgia chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

The main actors are Russia, Iran, increasingly North Korea and China, the latter of which aggressively goes after companies' intellectual property, often through phishing scams, in an attempt to discover their research and development and beat them to market, said John Boles, a principal at PwC and formerly assistant director of international operations at the FBI.

In addition, China also uses insiders, both through recruiting employees in a target company and repeatedly paying off corporate insiders at U.S. companies “to simply walk out the door with high-value trade secrets,” Boles said.

And when those most-dreaded incidents of data compromise occur, it's not just the information technology team on the hot seat. A company's legal department and its in-house attorneys have an important role to play in the immediate aftermath, said Andrew Young, an attorney who works on cybersecurity, global investigations and intelligence issues for The Coca-Cola Co. and a former supervisory special agent with the FBI.

“We have to ask a lot of questions because our next call is going to be from the C-suite asking what happened,” he said. “I don't think our role should be to reverse-engineer malware. Our job is to translate all of the tech talk into strategic risks to the board” and executives, he said.

In addition to foreign actors, companies also should be aware that it is often insiders who expose their data, either intentionally or unintentionally, as in the case of an employee who, in the course of removing personal materials from his or her work computer, also inadvertently takes some company data, the panelists said.

“People aren't walking out with boxes anymore,” Young said.

For that reason, Young advises implementing strong human resources policies with a detailed checklist for when employees, including independent contractors, leave a company. These items should include the return of laptop computers, identification and access badges, parking passes, USB drives and other storage devices if employees are allowed to have them, he added.

According to the panelists, other tips can mitigate the potential loss of company data, including:

  • Implementation of IT controls once the company is aware that a particular employee is leaving
  • Development of an incident response plan
  • Avoidance of the specific terms “breach” and “compromise” until such has been confirmed
  • Notification to law enforcement

“The intelligence you get back is incredibly helpful for how you respond,” said Kamal Ghali, counsel at Atlanta firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore and former assistant U.S. attorney and deputy chief of the cyber and intellectual property crime section of the federal prosecutor's office in Atlanta.