American Start-Up Identifies Intellectual Property Violations

Strider Technologies, a Salt Lake City-based start-up, used open-source data in the Chinese segment of the Internet to identify stolen American technologies and the people who might have stolen them or may be tempted to do so.

Using custom software to scour widely available sources of information on China’s internet, Strider employees have identified two postdoctoral researchers in nanotechnology who, while working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the centre of nuclear experimentation in the US, were recruited into China’s Youth Thousand Talents Program. Both relocated to China and are now employed by university labs with ties to China’s defense industry, Strider executives said.

Companies around the world have been dealing with nation-state threats and IP theft for a decade or more, with little to no tools. 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,

said Eric Levesque, Strider’s CEO.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment on Strider’s claims about Oak Ridge. However, regarding allegations of IP theft involving China, a spokesperson for the ministry said:

Statements about the Chinese side’s so-called stealing of intellectual property ignore basic facts and are entirely malicious slandering and smearing against China. We firmly oppose this.

Strider's claims appeared amid ongoing debate in the US over how to investigate Chinese industrial espionage while protecting civil liberties.