What Is Corporate Espionage?

From someone planting an employee within your Huntington company to steal proprietary information to diving through company dumpsters or bugging your systems—it’s all corporate espionage. Corporate espionage is the act of one company using surveillance tactics to collect information that can be used as leverage against their business competitors. Often times, this act is illegal and can have severe repercussions.

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

As New York 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 become more lazy in their shredding practices.
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.