A global software firm has taken a former sales executive to court, accusing him of downloading thousands of sensitive company documents before he was dismissed and later moving to a competitor embroiled in a high-value fight for Australian Taxation Office-related work.

Cyara Solutions, an AI-driven customer experience platform, has filed proceedings against its former ANZ sales manager Stephen Mitchell and rival Hypertech Solutions. The company claims Hypertech gained an advantage through the alleged misuse of confidential material in a dispute over work Cyara says is worth about $3.5million.

According to a statement of claim lodged in June 2024, Cyara — founded in Melbourne and now headquartered in Texas — alleges Mr Mitchell violated his employment contract, a separate confidentiality agreement and his equitable obligation not to misuse confidential information.

Cyara also claims Mr Mitchell breached the Corporations Act by allegedly using information obtained during his employment with the company to benefit Hypertech.

In its case against Hypertech, Cyara alleges the rival company either assisted in or benefited from Mr Mitchell’s alleged breaches. Hypertech has denied the allegations.

A factual background outlined in a Supreme Court judgment from August 24 states that Mr Mitchell joined Cyara in 2017 as a Major Account Executive, before being promoted to ANZ Sales Manager.

Throughout his tenure, Mr Mitchell predominantly managed Cyara’s relationship with Optus, which subcontracted Cyara to provide services to the ATO.

In August 2022, Optus began communicating with Hypertech about new software for contact centres, the judgment states. 

The following February, Optus’ account manager emailed Mr Mitchell to say that the ATO was ‘aggressively seeking price reductions’ and wanted to see improved functionality from the software. Cyara’s pleadings characterise the correspondence as a notification of an open tender process.

Following negotiations, Cyara was able to renew its contract with Optus for another three years from July 2023.

On July 3, Mr Mitchell signed an additional confidentiality and intellectual property agreement with Cyara.

According to Cyara, Mr Mitchell learned in November or December that he was not in the running for the newly created ‘Vice President of International Sales’ role and would also not be attending the annual ‘sales kickoff event’ in the US.

Mr Mitchell disputes this version of events and asserts that he had no interest in the role and only learned of his non-attendance at the event when he received an email in January about his accommodation being cancelled.

While discussions were continuing between Optus and Hypertech, Mr Mitchell remained focused on securing the ATO tender, emailing his colleague on December 8 that he was making good progress.

According to Cyara’s pleadings, it was also around December 8 when Mr Mitchell downloaded approximately 11,000 work files to his personal drive, without authorisation or a work-related purpose. 

According to Cyara, more than 3,500 of these files contained confidential information, including pricing strategies, product roadmaps and contract terms.

In his defence, Mr Mitchell argues he saved copies to his work laptop and an external drive for the purpose of remote work, with no relation to any concerns he had about his ongoing employment.

On December 12, Optus emailed Mr Mitchell inviting Cyara to formally submit its cost proposal for the ATO testing contract, while also flagging concerns about the software’s declining use and integration issues.

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On Christmas Eve, Mr Mitchell received a call from Cyara’s chief executive, Mr Alok Kulkarni, which prompted fears that his employment was hanging in the balance.

After hanging up, Mr Mitchell fired off a string of text messages, urging the CEO to give him one more quarter at the company, stating he had ‘worked too hard’ in securing deals not to be paid for them.

An excerpt of messages included in the judgment shows Mr Mitchell texting Mr Kulkarni: ‘Worst phone call of my life and especially on the doorstep of Xmas.’

On Christmas Day, Mr Mitchell is alleged by Cyara to have downloaded eight additional files to his personal drive, which he then transferred onto a flash drive the next day.

On January 9, Mr Mitchell was terminated and a Deed of Settlement was executed, stipulating his compliance with a range of obligations including confidentiality and intellectual property.

Later that month, Cyara’s chief executive, Mr Kulkarni, responded to Mr Mitchell’s previous texts from Christmas Eve, telling him he had just returned from India and wanted to catch up.

In response, Mr Mitchell fired back: ‘Alok, you’re the CEO. If you wanted me there I’d still be there. I’m trying hard to lose the anger I feel, especially after our Xmas [was] ruined by your Xmas Eve phone call.

‘You were just distancing yourself from what was coming. I am so disappointed in you and also the new management team at Cyara who don’t even know me.’

Mr Mitchell then went on to say he had tripled the size of Cyara’s business and cash balance over two years and had missed out on both his long service leave entitlements and equity, and said he had ‘never felt more insulted’ in his life. 

‘But I’m just as angry at myself for believing anyone senior at Cyara, anyone I’ve known for years, would have a shred of the loyalty I’ve brought to every single one of the people I’ve supported there.’

Mr Kulkarni responded expressing sympathy and acknowledged his job loss as ‘unexpected’ while offering to be a reference.

In his defence, Mr Mitchell stated that in February, he applied for an ABN to conduct ad hoc consulting work, following a month of unsuccessful job hunting post-termination.

He approached a number of industry contacts, including Hypertech’s chief executive, to explore any work opportunities.

An in-principle agreement was reached, and Mr Mitchell began consulting for Hypertech on February 22.

By that stage, however, Hypertech had already been in discussions with Optus about its PumpCX software and opportunities with the ATO. The company had signed a Master Supply Agreement with Optus in December 2023 while Mr Mitchell was still employed by Cyara, with Optus formally executing the deal in February. 

A day after Mr Mitchell started consulting, Optus advised Hypertech it wanted to proceed with a trial of PumpCX, a contact-centre testing platform being evaluated as a potential replacement for Cyara’s technology at the ATO. 

In March, Optus notified Cyara that the ATO intended to end its supply contract, before informing the company in May that the ATO would cease using Cyara’s products and transition to those supplied by Hypertech from July 1, 2024. 

In June, Cyara then launched the current proceedings against both Mr Mitchell and Hypertech.

Earlier this month, in Victoria’s Supreme Court, Hypertech was successful in striking out Cyara’s claims against it for vagueness.

However, Hypertech’s bid to have the whole case thrown out was unsuccessful, with Cyara granted leave to file its claim again.

Greg Carafello was getting ready to join a work call from his office on the 18th floor of the World Trade Center when the building suddenly jolted around him.

The time was 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001 — the moment American Airlines Flight 11 struck the 110-story North Tower, sending shockwaves through the complex.

On most mornings, Carafello would not have arrived until about 9:30 a.m., but that day’s routine had changed after he took his son to school earlier than usual.

With the scale of the devastation still unclear and danger unfolding nearby, his employee Joe urged him to evacuate, despite the South Tower appearing to have escaped damage.

“Nobody knew a second plane was going to come in,” Carafello, now 66, told the Daily Mail.

The businessman grabbed his coffee, his Palm Pilot and a few personal belongings – leaving behind his checkbook and briefcase. 

He headed toward the claustrophobic stairwell, which was only 2.5 feet wide. Down they went, believing they would only be gone for a few minutes.

In fact, it took them 16 minutes just to get outside.

Initially they had stopped on the first concourse, where people usually bought lunch.

‘It looked like Lebanon in ’83,’ Carafello said, referring to the suicide bombing at the US Embassy in Beirut 18 years before.

‘It was just destroyed,’ Carafello said of the North Tower, where his friend Jimmy Martello died on the 110th floor. ‘And that wasn’t the second plane, that was only the first plane.’

After seeing the damage, and ‘just wanting to get the heck out of there’ they went to the level below in an attempt to catch a train out of the city.

The level known for its packed shops was in ruins.

‘There’s no canopy, there’s nothing to stop anything from falling a quarter mile,’ Carafello said. Unlike most skyscrapers, the Twin Towers had been built with no core, leaving a wide open space that contributed to their collapse.

Left with no choice, the pair headed back up to the main concourse and sprinted across the street.

‘Some people were just walking, taking pictures, and debris was falling all over,’ the father of four said. ‘I thought they were nuts, to tell you the truth.’

Still unaware of the horrors to come, he told Joe to ring their Jersey offices and explain that they would be back in 20 minutes.

That call, just two minutes before United Airlines Flight 175 struck the tower they had been in moments earlier, was the only reason his wife, Christine, knew he was alive.

As Joe called the other offices, Carafello, who had his back to the South Tower, watched him fall to his knees.

‘I’m like: “What the hell? What are you doing?”‘

Flying just behind Carafello’s head was the second plane. Joe watched it as it slammed into the South Tower, crashing through floors 77 through 85.

At this stage everyone took off, dashing for safety as dust and debris rained down on them.

‘You knew it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a small plane. It wasn’t any of the stuff that in your mind,’ he said.

‘So, at that point, everybody runs.’

He and Joe took off toward South Seaport, before heading uptown. At Alphabet City they found a police officer, who they asked how to get off the island. They were told Manhattan had been sealed.

They ended up walking to the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Midtown, roughly an hour and a half from where the World Trade Center.

‘We begged them to give us a room,’ Carafello recalled. They had already been turned away from two other hotels, despite his premium memberships.

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‘By this point, we were dirty and sweaty and shaky. We’re out of juice,’ he said.

They bought new clothes at the gift shop at Bull and Bear Steakhouse Bar. They went upstairs to shower before returning to the restaurant, where they watched the TV footage of the attack with the rest of the customers.

‘That’s when we started to realize the depth of what had happened,’ Carafello said.

Carafello and Joe still had to make it back home to Jersey, where Christine had been in church with friends, praying for his safe return.

He learned there was a boat that would take him to Jersey at 7.30pm.

Along the route, Carafello saw the remnants of the Twin Towers. Smoke was still rising from the ground after the buildings’ collapse. First responders were still pouring over the rubble looking for survivors.

When Carafello looked at the ruins of his old office building, he simply felt numb.

‘It had been such a stressful day that you were kind of out of emotions.’

At that moment he was left wondering just how many people had died, how many were still trapped, and what would come of Manhattan afterwards.

A total of 2,977 people were murdered by the al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked jets across the US that day. At least 3,000 people have died from 9/11-related cancers and other conditions, according to the WTC Health Program.

It was almost midnight by the time Carafello made it safely back to his wife and four children, who were aged four to 14 years old at the time.

Save for a brief visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was helping his 30 employees in the immediate aftermath, Carafello would not step foot back in Manhattan for six years.

‘You could feel it, the minute you got off the ferry, you could feel your whole body jazz up again, because of the memory,’ Carafello said.

It wasn’t until 2007 that Carafello would change his mind. His son convinced him to buy his friend’s business and get back into the Manhattan market.

‘I wasn’t going to buy, because I was kind of done with New York,’ Carafello told the Daily Mail. ‘[But] he was right. So I bought the business and went back.’

On the 10-year anniversary in 2011, the 9/11 Memorial opened with two reflecting pools where the Twin Towers once stood.

Carafello began volunteering at the 9/11 Museum, educating visitors about the artifacts on display there. He watched as the new World Trade Center was built.

In April 2015, he took the extraordinary step of signing for a lease on the 85th floor of the newly constructed Freedom Tower.

Though he struggled with visiting the office at first, Carafello credits his volunteer hours with helping him.

‘You just kept going until you felt better,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘When you’re up there, and you’re in a meeting, and you see a helicopter below you… It never bothered me before, and doesn’t bother me today at all.’

‘It’s very cathartic,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘I’m proud of returning.’

Out of the 400 businesses inside the old World Trade Centers, Carafello’s is believed to be the only one to have made a return

‘When they first opened [the museum and new buildings], I didn’t know if … I wanted to be more involved. But it’s one of the best things I’ve done in life.

‘I still do it. I’ll do it till I’m 100.’

He believes he’s impacted thousands of lives through his volunteer work. On a single Friday, he speaks to 300 to 400 people.

‘They didn’t know the amount of fuel in the plane. They didn’t know the speed of the plane. I mean, you start hearing 540 miles an hour and 440 miles an hour and it brings to light the explosive power these things had.’

Carafello plans to mark the upcoming anniversary of the attacks by honoring the fallen at the museum. He says he will arrive for his volunteering shift at 5.30am.

‘It’s 25 years later, but it happened,’ he said. ‘It’s not a movie.’

‘This was not an accident… This was a murder scene.’

A technology entrepreneur who has lived with multiple mental health conditions is warning that some young people may be adopting symptoms they first encounter in TikTok videos.

Josef Newton, who has experienced OCD and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and later created an app aimed at tackling health anxiety, has drawn attention to what he calls ‘symptom borrowing’.

Newton describes the term as the process of noticing, reinterpreting or anticipating sensations and behaviours after seeing similar experiences shared by others online.

‘Attention, expectation and anxiety can amplify everyday physical feelings or behaviours that previously went unnoticed,’ he added.

His warning comes as social media platforms such as TikTok rely on powerful recommendation algorithms that repeatedly serve users content linked to topics they have already engaged with or shown interest in.

If a user has watched a clip about a content creator’s diagnosis of a condition, the app will show them several similar videos, Newton suggests.

But Newton says this can fuel anxiety, making viewers search their mind and body for symptoms that may not exist.

These recommendations can make relatively uncommon diagnoses feel both familiar and personally relevant, he added. 

It comes months after researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) warned that inaccurate social media posts about ADHD and autism could be encouraging some young people to believe they have the conditions.

The UEA study examined more than 5,000 social media posts across various platforms, and said misinformation about conditions like ADHD and autism was ‘consistently higher on TikTok than other platforms’.

Diagnoses of ADHD diagnoses have risen around 20-fold since the turn of the century.

Around 2.5 million Britons today have the condition, which the NHS describes as when ‘the brain works differently to most people’.

At the time, Dr Eleanor Chatburn, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, claimed young people are increasingly using social media to understand their symptoms. 

‘While this questioning can be a helpful starting point, it’s important these questions lead to proper clinical assessment with a professional,’ she said.

‘As well as leading to misunderstanding of serious conditions and pathologising ordinary behaviour, misinformation can also lead to delayed diagnosis for people that actually do need help.’

Newton also warned users to be cautious of social media content that presents ordinary experiences as signs of an underlying health condition.

These include procrastination, feeling shy at social gatherings or becoming tired after socialising.

Other warning signs of ‘symptom borrowing’, he said, include noticing a behaviour for the first time only after watching a video about it.

‘A great example of this is if somebody asks you to notice how your tongue feels in your mouth; it suddenly becomes difficult to ignore’, he explained. 

‘The sensation was always there, but attention has made it prominent. Health videos can replicate a similar effect.’

He said this ‘does not prove that a symptom is insignificant’ but urged people to ask themselves whether they’d ever noticed it before, or whether it has ever caused them any problems in life.

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Newton also said users should take notice when the same symptom seems to point to different conditions depending on what appears on their social media feed. 

For example, tiredness might one day be interpreted as a symptom of ADHD and the next as evidence of burnout.

Josef says checking symptoms after watching an informative video is perfectly normal.

But repeatedly monitoring them, he warned, may end up ‘maintaining the fear rather than answering it’.

He added: ‘Pay attention to how you feel after consuming the content. If you are more frightened, confused or compelled to keep searching, the videos are no longer functioning as useful health education.  

‘Set a clear boundary: write down the concern, step away from symptom content and consult an appropriate professional or reputable medical source. 

‘One qualified conversation is likely to be more useful than another hour of conflicting videos.’

He stressed, however, that people who experience symptoms after encountering health content online are not necessarily pretending or imagining them.  

The symptoms can feel entirely genuine, he said, and more awareness may cause people to focus on sensations or behaviours they would previously have ignored. 

At the time of the University of East Anglia study, a TikTok spokesman said: ‘This is a flawed study that relies on outdated research about multiple platforms. 

‘The facts are that we remove harmful health misinformation and provide access to reliable information from the WHO, so that our community can express themselves about what matters to them and find support.’

TikTok have been approached for further comment. 

The social media platform has been linked to misleading ADHD content previously.

Research in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in 2022 analysed 100 TikTok videos that discussed the condition.

Scientists found that more than half were classed as misleading, while just around a fifth were useful.

The team, led by University of British Columbia researchers, also found that most of the misleading videos had been posted by non-healthcare professionals.

There are fears that increasing volumes of such content, paired with symptom borrowing, could be behind rising diagnoses in a range of conditions.

‘The concern here is that few content creators are medical professionals and serve anecdotal evidence only,’ says Newton.

‘Social media often provides valuable education, language and validation, but short-form videos don’t replicate clinical assessments.

‘Of course, TikTok can be the reason a user recognises a genuine problem and seeks support, which is a positive.

‘It becomes problematic when recognition evolves into monitoring. Once you have learnt a list of symptoms, your brain may begin to search for them.’