In September 2017 law enforcement officers informed Coca Cola executives that an ex employee of the company had a hard drive containing corporate data which was collected illegally. The official notification was received by more than 8 000 employees of the company. The copy of notification was published by the office of the Vermont Attorney General in May 2018.

The incident wasn’t announced until the investigation was completed. The company helped the officers to determine the source of information and whether it’s correct.

The compromised data varied but the leak may include personal information. To assist the staff in securing confidentiality Coca Cola approached a risk management company which is responsible for data leak prevention and recovery. All the year employees whose personal info was compromised will use monitoring services which detect data (personal data, account details and other sensitive data) misuse for free.

The Coca Cola Company appeared to be one of those businesses which unknowingly let their ex employees benefit from them. In 2017 the United States Department of Homeland Security was accused of stealing the data of 246 000 colleagues. In the beginning of the same year in China ex employees of Huawei were arrested for the leakage.

Dismissed employees have other ways to harm their ex employers besides leaking information. A former system administrator of Allegro MicroSystems put a malicious code with a delayed launch into the corporate database.