Former cyber executive turned whistleblower accuses IBM of covering up several data breaches

Key points

• A former IBM cybersecurity executive accused the company of getting hacked three times in the previous decade by foreign governments and then covering up the breaches.
• In a lawsuit unsealed this week but filed in 2020, William Barlow, who was IBM’s vice president of threat intelligence until August 2019, said IBM concluded Chinese hackers breached its core network between 2013 and 2016 but that the company then covered up the breaches and never disclosed them.
• Barlow also said at least two IBM subsidiaries were also breached, and that IBM covered up those breaches as well.
• Barlow alleged in his complaint that IBM’s core network was “routinely hacked by foreign state actors and others,” adding that data was frequently stolen and government agencies were “never notified.” While the alleged breaches date back more than a decade, the news shows that cyberattacks, even those affecting large public tech companies such as IBM,...