INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE

The Company today is more and more exposed to industrial and also computerized espionage, which has the goal of acquiring information with illicit means and techniques (unfaithful personnel, communication interceptions, audio surveillance, computerized espionage) from which to take an economic advantage, sometimes even political. In a business context, knowing the intentions of competitors is a considerable advantage to implement the best defense or attack strategy.

A violation of the company network is inevitable if computer security technologies are not able to supply effective protection against more and more sophisticated attacks. Data theft is usually used to:

• obtain research-related secrets;

• discover marketing projects;

• identify key people to use in order to obtain the information;

• determine the quality and weaknesses of the competition, acquiring information that, once made public, may create economic damage; often with the aim of reducing its value and acquiring its possession

• discover competitors' procurement proposals.

Companies must be more careful also towards the bad actions that start from the inside. Malicious codes, spyware and spam represent a real bogeyman for any organization, in fact, threats coming from inside, both those committed by mistake or with superficiality and those coming from a precise intent, are rapidly rising. Data theft carried out by an unfaithful employee or business partner and internal sabotage represent a very significant risk for organizations. These threats will increase in the coming years. Success on the market is conceived as the result of coordinated and joint activity from all forces in the economic field, including intelligence systems, which can play an exceptionally important role if they are properly designed to offer support, including operational support where necessary, to the competition in the most complex scenarios. The success of strategic planning, in the economic/industrial sector, lays its foundations on the quality and quantity of the information provided to the decision-maker, who will be able to elaborate his choices with greater weighting: the more sensitive the information acquired is, the more he will tend to protect it and even more he will have to fight against entities that intend to capture it. The correct understanding and the complete use of intelligence tools, therefore, require first of all an external projection of the company's decision-making apparatus.