When an employee mistakenly shows documents stolen from his former employer on Microsoft Teams, it is Nvidia who risks paying the costs.
It all started with a fairly standard video conference: Mohammad Moniruzzaman, a new employee of Nvidia, apparently showed confidential documents stolen from his former company, which he caught red-handed. during a video call.
The events took place on March 8, 2022, when this employee had left the automotive technology company Valeo the previous year. Having joined Nvidia, he had to collaborate with his former employer on a parking assistance project for an unnamed car manufacturer.
But during a video conference on Microsoft Teams on which he was broadcasting his screen, Mohammad Moniruzzaman had the bad idea of reducing the PowerPoint window that he was showing to the rest of the participants. Behind, his former employers could have seen pieces of the source code from a parking assistance application developed by Valeo.
An expensive video
According to the complaint filed on November 7, 2023, Moniruzzaman’s error did not go unnoticed by Valeo employees:
Mr. Moniruzzaman’s flight was so cheeky that the file path on his screen still read “ValeoDocs“. Participants in Valeo’s video conference immediately recognized the source code and took a screenshot before Mr. Moniruzzaman was alerted to his error. It was then too late to erase his traces.
Less than a year later, in September 2023, German police charged Mohammad Moniruzzaman with stealing confidential documents. The latter did not even at any time deny the charges against him, claiming to have stolen the source code of the software belonging to Valeo in order to exploit it for his new employer Nvidia.
If the employee was fined 14,400 euros for these facts, Valeo does not intend to stop there: Nvidia is now in the crosshairs of the French company.
Nvidia attacked in turn
If Nvidia wants to dissociate itself from the case, the manufacturer will have a hard time convincing Valeo’s lawyers. The graphics card manufacturer also sent a letter to Valeo in June 2022 in which its lawyers assured that the actions of its new employee were not known before the first investigation.
Still according to Nvidia, the source code stolen from Valeo by Mohammad Moniruzzaman was “stored only locally on your laptop» while ensuring that they have “no interest in Valeo’s code or its alleged trade secrets and promptly took concrete steps to protect the rights claimed by the customer“.
According to the original 2022 complaint filed by Valeo, Mohammad Moniruzzaman’s actions have already impacted Nvidia’s work:
Nvidia admitted that Mr. Moniruzzaman’s code was merged into Nvidia’s database after extensive editing and feedback by other employees to align the code with the original design and Nvidia’s vision of the project, which makes it unrealistic for Nvidia to remove ideas, systems, or solutions that Mr. Moniruzzaman added to the code.
Valeo will therefore seek to obtain damages from Nvidia, which allegedly profited illegally from its proprietary work. A date for the trial has not yet been announced.
Want to join a community of enthusiasts? Our Discord welcomes you, it is a place of mutual help and passion around tech.