Industrial Espionage & Social Media

Most companies are concerned with cyber threats such as hacks, viruses, malware and denial of service attacks. Yet a new threat to industry comes from social media or social networking services. That is industrial espionage by a) recruitment of employees to buy secrets or b) monitoring of employees engaged in social media to gain insights into what is happening and c) moles as employees using social media to engage employees or transmit intelligence. We take a quick look at these threats;

1. Employee Recruitment: Sounds like cold war style stuff doesn’t it? Fact is, it happens and is happening. Someone makes “friends” via a social networking connection and over time builds a trust relationship with that person. The end-goal being to get key information from that employee. The agent doing the recruiting may be a State employee working for an intelligence department or it may be a competitor who has staff that do this (usually former police or intelligence officers) or retain a third party.

2. Monitoring for Social Network Intelligence: Using data mining tools, social media monitoring services or through manual research and assessment, a competitive company or government looks for keywords and small bits of information. This is intelligence that can be used to assess corporate activities like moving into a new market, taking over another company or product information. Employees who use services like Twitter, blogs or Facebook may not even realize the damage they can cause through sharing information – what they think is an innocent comment, connected by a trained analyst can draw a bigger picture for a competitor.

3. Employee Moles: A government or competitor may insert an employee into a company in a department where they may be able to steal corporate secrets such as software, product plans, financial information etc. This is a challenge for companies and depends on their security procedures and perceived level of threat. This is a fairly common practice however and companies can have difficulty in Canada, US, EU and UK with regards to how much they can dig into a persons background or ask for information. Nor can a company dictate what a person does outside work hours, such as being on Facebook or using Twitter.