Napalm Riot

The FBI has charged a former Intel engineer with the theft of sensitive documents from the chip maker after leaving to work for AMD.

Biswamohan Pani, 33, was indicted Wednesday on four new counts of wire fraud following his initial charge for stealing trade secrets in September.

The FBI has said that Pani, who used to be a design engineer for Intel's Itanium chips, took eight sensitive documents from Intel's Massachusetts facility while in the midst of using his accrued vacation time after his resignation. Pani had told management he was leaving Intel because a hedge fund "showed some interest" in letting him handle their "multi-million dollar accounts" and might "dabble in that for a few months." However, the truth of it was that Pani had been given a job offer by AMD months earlier and was going to work there four days after he resigned, according to court documents.

Pani spent his final days at Intel using his vacation days outside of the office, and only showed up for his last day of work. While he was on vacation, he was on the payroll for both AMD and Intel, and the prosecutors claim that he used his Intel-issued laptop to get into the company's network and download the documents in question. Intel has stated the reason for not terminating Pani's access was that no one knew he was working for a competitor.

In his final day at the office, Pani attended an exit interview and allegedly didn't admit he had been hired by AMD until the moment. In addition, he also reaffirmed his confidentiality obligations and told management he had returned all Intel property, according to prosecutors.

The Intel documents had been encrypted and therefore special steps were required to review them after being disconnected from Intel's system, and Pani supposedly tried to get into the network one more time two days later. He had made a copy of his Intel laptop, but was unable to get past the first login screen.

According to the FBI, Pani told detectives he had taken the documents because he was curious. AMD spokesman Micheal Silverman states that, "AMD is cooperating fully in the FBI investigation into this matter."

"AMD has not been accused of wrongdoing, and the FBI has stated that there is no evidence that AMD had any involvement in or awareness of Mr. Pani's alleged actions."

If charged, Pani faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for theft of trade secrets and 20 years on each his four counts of wire fraud.

(Source: http://www.theregister.co…ling_intel_trade_secrets/)