During the past six months, your company has consistently been losing competitive bids to a nearby company whose bids always seem to be slightly lower. Subsequent investigation reveals that an employee of your company in the payroll department has been stealing your bid data and selling it to the competitor for $5,000 per bid. Your company has offices in five buildings. Computing services are pro¬ vided using five local area networks connected by a common carrier.

Required

a. Identify methods that the employee could be using to obtain the data.

b. For each method, identify at least one control that could have been used to detect or prevent the data theft.