Protecting Your Company from Corporate Espionage

Corporate espionage involves the secret act of one company using surveillance to gather information that can be used as leverage against their business competitors. Often times, this act is illegal and can have severe repercussions.

From someone planting an employee within your company to steal proprietary information to diving through company dumpsters or bugging your systems—it’s all corporate espionage. It’s critical that your business keeps up to date on vulnerabilities to corporate espionage and the best practices to prevent it from happening to you.

Historically, businesses in the technology industry have always been most vulnerable to corporate espionage, and the same rings true today. Both foreign and domestic companies alike will often try to infiltrate a monolithic competitor. Even governments are inclined to undertake corporate espionage to this day—in 2010, the Chinese infiltrated Google’s networks in an attack known as Operation Aurora.

As businesses become increasingly paperless, much corporate espionage has occurred in the form of cyber attacks or recovering data from old hard drives. Yet the physical theft of documents and collecting of information from confidential files is also still a common occurrence, as businesses get less and less vigilant in their shredding practices.

There are several strategies you can implement in order to protect yourself from corporate espionage—the first and foremost being conscientious about your business’ waste. Carefully considering how and where documents and hard drives are disposed of should be the first strategy you strengthen in arming yourself against corporate espionage, as digging through carelessly disposed information is the easiest way for an infiltrator to gain access to it. Shredding documents and destroying hard drives before a mole can gain access to the information makes his or her job much harder, eliminating street criminals and low-level employees from ever having a chance to steal information from your business.