This really highlights poor working conditions. Stop treating your employees like their the stuff stuck on the bottom of your shoe and just maybe they'll stop looking for ways to get even. It's also why Glassdoor exists.
Or maybe, <i>just maybe</i>, you should wonder why your company is full of disgruntled employees in the first place. Perhaps even listen to their complaints, if you're really feeling like a radical egalitarian or something.
To a degree these worried companies seem to be overreacting:<p>* Disgruntled insiders always have been a security threat, and usually the biggest threat.<p>* If the seller is operating on open markets, even anonymously, the company has much more visibility into what's happening than before, when the transactions were more private (I assume). The markets must have sufficient liquidity (i.e., buyers) for the seller to succeed, so I would guess that only reasonably well-known darknet markets would be used. Just monitor those markets and you know what is being sold and in many cases can narrow down who the seller is or even catch them and the buyer.<p>* Fear of a sociopathic 'lone wolf' is often exaggerated. Consider the similar reaction to terrorist attacks: People think, 'anyone could buy a gun and shoot up a crowded place', but that's not how it works. Physically, anyone could do it - anyone could drive their car into a crowd, an opportunity that arises billions of times per day - but people don't do it. The evidence is overwhelming: Human behavior is much safer than we fear.<p>* I suspect some is an overreaction to an unfamiliar new tech with a scary name: The Darknet.
Seems overly paranoid. The only people who can gain from the leakage of proprietary data from their competitors also have a lot to lose if they make use of such data and get caught at it.
In case any are interested, the original model and experiment for a leakers' market was Tim May's BlackNet as described here:<p><a href="http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm" rel="nofollow">http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm</a><p>Good news he only received a few offers despite all the privacy tech involved. I wonder what the number would be today. Wikileaks shows it could be significant.