Product Habits - OpenSea’s recent incident

I’ve been really interested in NFTs lately. So when I saw the news about insider trading at OpenSea I couldn’t help but read everything I could get my hands on.

The tl;dr of what happened is that an employee used information they gained from working at the company to buy NFTs that were going to be posted to the OpenSea homepage. Those NFTs were going to go way up in value as soon as they got posted, which meant that the employee was benefitting (making a profit) from the insider knowledge.

Since all of the employee’s trades were visible to the public because OpenSea trades are transparent, all it took was some sleuthing on Twitter by a few people who noticed the strange activity, and the whole thing got blown open.

Unfortunately, this is where we are today.

People have access to loads of company information. Sometimes they should have that access, and sometimes they shouldn’t. But more often than not, links on confidential documents get left open and then anyone in the company can see the information. Even outsiders routinely get access. A document breach or a major issue is all just an open link away.

As a co-founder of a security company, I like to get these three things locked down:

Visibility into who has access to company information, across every document and every account. If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it.
Cutting off access when people shouldn’t have it. This means employee personal accounts and third parties who shouldn’t have access anymore.
Ability for folks on the team who are doing the work to see who has access to their documents. It’s not just IT’s job to secure documents, security is every employee’s job.

If you’re reading the news and you see phrases like “insider trading” or “leaked information”, it’s probably a sign that something went wrong with the documents and who has access to them.

If you want some help or want to talk about best practices to prevent leaks, let me know. I'm always happy to jump on a call.

Hiten

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Product Habits - OpenSea’s recent incident

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