Copyright: Financial Times
“Industrial espionage is being catapulted to a position of great relevance to many of the world’s top companies as technological change becomes of growing importance to business performance. Companies across the world are increasingly interested in gaining access to their competitors’ secrets as early as possible in the development cycle for new products and services.
Most corporate intelligence gathering is legitimate, based on such conventional practices as picking up scraps of information about competitors by attending trade shows. But few people involved doubt that the illicit part of this activity is bigger than it ever was.
The ways that secrets are taken vary. One of the most widely used is when employees switch jobs, taking with them confidential designs.
But the vast majority of cyber-espionage cases in the US, which are linked to “hacking” into computer networks, have been traced to e-mails with plausible-looking attachments that use parts of Microsoft Word and other commonplace programs to extract information and channel it to unauthorised people over the internet. Warnings about such espionage are often ignored by staff, however, so experts recommend that businesses focus instead on rapid patching of such software “vulnerabilities”.”
Business espionage and countermeasures are addressed in detail in a one-day workshop on the forthcoming Security Management Stage 3 Course. If you have a particular interest in this subject, but don’t wish to attend the whole course, you may attend the workshop as a day delegate. Contact Janet for details.
