It is also pretty rare for some code to be that valuable. It would be about as much work for to figure out hot to leverage stolen code for profit as to just write your own. Data getting stolen on the other hand is much worse.

Agree with this thread, if you see code as data, there's probably plenty of other data in any organisation that needs higher levels of protection

Would you need to notify the ICO (UK) of a data breach if your code was leaked online?

Yes that's also my thoughts, I have all the code of my current employer on my laptop, what would you do with that code if you got your hands into it? Nothing really, there's not a single use case I can think of which could be useful to somebody.

It may make finding security vulnerabilities a bit easier.

Other than that I can't really think of use cases either for the code bases I've worked on.

> It may make finding security vulnerabilities a bit easier.

Yes that's about it really, there's so much custom code related to our business that even if you are a direct competitor you are not going to get anything out of it.

When you're a giant target you need to be careful, but you often don't need to steal either. Meanwhile, in my experience there are amoral and desperate small businesses on every streetcorner stealing anything they can get their hands on. The alternative is often to not make any money becasuse they lack the skills. When you look internationally, the tech industry consists of a finite number of skilled and capable people and organizations, plus a vast ocean of people in over their heads.