Economic espionage or competitive intelligence
Jinfo Blog

30th July 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

Item

Currently, the news is full of economic espionage reports - surely a sign of the current crisis. Companies tend towards illegal business behaviour in challenging times as business opportunities become rare and competition tough. USA Today reported yesterday again on this topic (http://digbig.com/5bacxa). It's not only companies - your competitors - that seek to illegally obtain your criticial business information; countries and their intelligence services are also on the prey. All those news reports are right and shed light on a very important topic that causes billions of dollars' worth of damage to economies and single companies worldwide. Yet these reports often enough fall short too, as they do not differentiate between illegal and legal activities; their lurid reports are designed to push their own sales. Economic espionage is illegal as it seeks to obtain confidential data and insights on companies' critical success factors, their intellectual property or any other knowledge or asset that gives them an advantage in the market. Competitive intelligence is legal as it uses ethically correct methods and techniques to obtain publicly available data and information, analyses these and generates insights to support strategic and tactical management decisions. Seventy to eighty per cent of what one should know about one's competition is publicly available; the rest can be 'constructed' or deduced with business analysis techniques and experience (both industry and professional). Competitive intelligence is actually normal practice - looking at others to better understand what they do, where they have strengths or even why they miss opportunities. For security professionals and counter intelligence specialists there is no big difference if a company is legally or illegally attacked. They have the whole spectrum of possible security weaknesses in sight and design countermeasures appropriately. With their work they encounter resistance, particularly within the companies who are their customers, brought on partly by the thoughtlessness of employees. Security professionals need to continuously train and educate employees on information security. Using easy to realize means any business can raise the barriers and improve protection against economic espionage. In the USA, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) recommends six simple steps (http://digbig.com/5bacxb): 1. Recognize there is a real threat. 2. Identify and evaluate trade secrets. 3. Implement a definable plan for safeguarding trade secrets. 4. Secure physical trade secrets and limit access to trade secrets. 5. Confine intellectual knowledge. 6. Provide ongoing security training to employees. In the USA, it's the FBI that is responsible for fighting economic espionage. It is their number two priority - second only to fighting terrorism and it shows the importance of the topic and the threat it poses to the economy. So stay alert and be on your guard; the threat is real to many of us.

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