By now, many of you have seen either an original article when Eliot Doxer was arrested, or a more recent article covering his guilty plea. As the articles (and the original complaint) note, Mr. Doxer, then an Akamai employee, reached out to the Israeli government, offering to sell information to them. His outreach was passed along to the FBI, who acted out a multi-year cloak and dagger scenario in which Mr. Doxer was providing information -- he believed to Israeli intelligence -- that instead went solely to the FBI. Early on, Akamai was alerted to the matter on a confidential basis, and we provided assistance over the years. Obviously, we can't go into detail about that.

What was this information?

Mr. Doxer was an employee in our Finance Department on the collections team, and, in the course of his job, he had routine and appropriate access to a limited amount of Akamai's business confidential information - like who our customers are and what they buy from us. At no time, however, was Mr. Doxer authorized to access the confidential information of our customers - including access to our production networks, our source code, or our customer configurations.

In pleading guilty to one count of foreign economic espionage, Mr. Doxer stipulated that he gave an FBI undercover agent, among other things, copies of contracts between Akamai and some of our customers. The Justice Department has confirmed that the Akamai information was never disclosed to anyone other than a U.S. law enforcement officer.

Lessons Learned

We used this incident as an opportunity to review our controls, to assess whether or not a deficiency was exploited and identify areas for improvement. We looked both at this specific case, as well as the general case of insider threats, and have identified and implemented additional controls to reduce our exposure.

And we've given thanks to the FBI for their outstanding work.