In this case, Agrawal's activities appear to have remained unnoticed despite what should have been some obvious signs such as his accessing a unit of proprietary code that he was not allowed access to or his printing out of hundreds of pages of proprietary on a Saturday, Neray said.

Incidents such as this highlight why companies need to have tools that not only control access to sensitive data but monitor all access as well, he said.

Importantly, such incidents also hammer home the importance of monitoring logs on a regular basis and having a system for real-time alerts when something out of the ordinary is happening on a network, he said.

"Just because you have logs doesn't mean you are secure," Neray said. "Logs are just logs. They are useless unless you examine them," he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld . Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at ? @jaivijayan or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed ? . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com .