McAfee has sued three former employees who allegedly stole the company's trade secrets to transfer them to their new employer, rival company Tanium.
The trial is being held in the Eastern District Court of Texas. According to the charges, three high-ranking members of the sales department, Jennifer Kinney, Alan Coe and Percy Tejeda, who were intimately familiar with McAfee's trade secrets and strategy, conspired to steal confidential information.
The security company is seeking damages not only for trade secret misappropriation, but also for “breach of contract, tortious interference, breach of fiduciary duty, aiding and abetting a crime, and conspiracy.”
According to the court, late last year, Tejeda resigned from McAfee and went to work for rival company Tanium, in California. After settling in at the new company, he asked Kinney to resign from McAfee and join Tanium.
McAfee didn't appreciate Tejeda's move and informed him that his contract did not allow him to "steal" McAfee employees. Soon after, Tanium's legal team sent a letter to the company informing it that another sales employee had also joined Tanium.
After all three employees left, McAfee examined the computers used by Kinney and Coe to determine whether confidential information had been stolen.
The company claims that both employees had gained access to confidential information, before and after announcing their resignations, and had transferred the information to specific email addresses, to Google Drive, and via USB.
All three employees held important positions at the company (Tejeda was the former CFO) and were involved in transactions worth tens of millions of dollars. McAfee says these employees knew everything from marketing plans to pricing information to confidential data .
The company claims that former employees stole this information for Tanium's benefit.
McAfee currently knows that employees had access to sensitive business and financial documents, but it doesn't know exactly what files were transferred to the competitor. That's why it's hoping the court will give it permission to inspect Google Drive accounts and USB devices to determine the exact extent of the information leak.
A document called the “Deal Tracker” has McAfee particularly concerned. This file was allegedly obtained by Kinney before she resigned and contains sales and billing information. This means that the file contains customer names, transaction information, forecasts, costs and notes about pricing.
Kinney is also accused of accessing an internal database containing information about customer orders.
“In addition, some of Kinney’s last activities on her McAfee computer included forwarding nineteen emails to another of her personal email accounts. Several of these emails contained company records regarding recent sales, sales forecasts, customers, and McAfee’s sales team,” the complaint states.
McAfee hopes the company will not be significantly affected by the data theft. However, the company claims that the “misappropriation and threatened misappropriation of trade secrets” has caused actual loss and is therefore entitled to seek compensation.
“This thing has caused and will continue to cause damage to McAfee and improvement to Tanium,” McAfee says.
McAfee hopes that Tanium and the three employees will receive appropriate punishment for the harm they caused and that they will compensate the company.
