Hardly, he retorts: a decade ago, Unilever had a huge computer network for sharing internal information.

ECONOMIST: Branded goods (1)

While some attackers got in and out quickly when they had stolen payment information, others were content to lurk inside a network for months, seeking out useful internal information including intellectual property, design documents or confidential financial plans.

BBC: How the New York Times cleaned house after its hack attack

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

NPR: Twitter Says Hackers Compromise 250K Accounts

The expert-network companies say internal policies bar their consultants from disclosing confidential information.

WSJ: U.S. Pursues Sweeping Insider-Trading Probe

Every time an employee opens a confidential client e-mail or downloads a document detailing internal strategy from a location other than the secure office network, that information is at risk for exposure to criminals, competitors and other unintended audiences.

FORBES: Securing Corporate Data In An Increasingly Mobile World

Its goal is to map the complex network of signalling reactions which cells use as an internal messaging system, and then feed this information into other computational models.

ECONOMIST: REPORTS: The heart of the matter | The