9 ways to find out whether your company is victim of industrial espionage (pt.1)

1) Monitor employee wellbeing

Keep an eye on both your employees’ and your managers’ happiness. Data stealing and intelligence gathering from within the company tends to be performed by users with high level of privileges such as system administrators and upper management. Your staff happiness and work satisfaction levels are key elements to identify a potential risk of corporate espionage. An unhappy employee can easily turn into a mole.

2) Watch finances.

If your employees and managers are in financial trouble, they will be more prone to sell business intelligence to your competitors. A passion for gambling, wrong investment decisions, a lover with an expensive taste – all common factors that may lead to data selling. If your staff is in financial trouble, the safety of key business information is more likely to be compromised thus exposing your company to the risk of industrial espionage.

3) Draw up a list.

Make a list of the most sensitive data and trade secrets your company posseses. Access to such intelligence should only be granted following the principle of least privilege, and consider making critical data classified. This is how CIA operates… and they know what they are doing!

4) Verify absences.

Check on your staff absences, especially those who have access to critical information. Missing unusual days at the office (i.e. Wednesdays and Thursdays, not long weekends) with weekly frequency may indicate possible interviews with competitors thereby leading to corporate espionage.

5) Keep an eye on the clock.

The best time to carry out malicious activity and roam freely through critical intelligence without having been granted access to it is early mornings or late evenings, when no one else is at work. Keep track of your employees’ timetable: long hours are not necessarily a sign of dedication to work and there may be underlying reasons for this behaviour.

Have you always thought that industrial espionage only involved dodgy types with a square jaw and a Russian accent? Or were you expecting to find someone wearing a suspicious trench coat in your company’s yard? Do you look at the building next door picturing suited up agents conspiring inside waving aerial-like transmitters? Stop daydreaming. Industrial espionage is a serious business that can jeopardise your company, however small or large. In 99% of instances, industrial espionage does not come from the outside. It is your own staff, at all levels, who may pose a real threat from within.

Here are 10 easy tricks to understand whether you are at risk of industrial espionage with the most suitable techniques to counter-act it.

If you notice any of the signs described above in your staff, your business intelligence might be at risk. All your hard work, ideas and know-how gathered over years may be traded off to competitors in exchange of a trivial pay rise. Similarly, your staff may exploit your company’s know-how, break off and start their own business taking customers with them, failing to abide by the covenant not to compete.

Turn to a reliable investigation agency to avoid the risk of industrial espionage. Turn to the experts trusted by the experts. Turn to Carpinvest Group.