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Industrial espionage appeared along with the development of economy and the appearance of new multinational corporations. In reality industrial espionage represents an attempt to obtain important information about certain products, specific clients, plans and commercial secrets of a company. Such attempt is usually considered to be illegal. It is legal when competing firm tries to find as much information as possible about the rival from public records, but when it goes into private then those involved in industrial espionage can face jail term and/or financial penalties.

In most cases when a spy is looking forward to find secret information about the competitor, he or she tries to find someone who works for the rivaling company and bribe or blackmail that individual to obtain the necessary data. There are more chances of getting secret information from a person who was recently fired from the spied company. The punishment for the person divulging private data can rang from the fact that this person can be fired and up to serious criminal charges. Often companies try to make sure the information does not come out of its walls by providing confidentiality agreements which its employees must sign.

Among other types of industrial espionage there's hacking into the computer system of the spied company. Such attempt to steal private information is rather common today. There are hackers who use names of personal data about clients to steal their money, while other hackers have the goal of stealing precious information to sell it then to another company.

If a company's officials believe that someone may steal or is stealing private information, they may consider promptly changing access codes, inform clients that they private data is currently vulnerable or take certain steps to impede the suspected competing company in gaining access to private data. In the past and today nearly all governments and transnational corporations are involved in industrial espionage. There are companies who registered a huge thrive during the history thanks to ideas they managed to steal. Due to the fact that most often spies are not caught, there is little chance that we will see the end of industrial espionage.

Tips to Halt Industrial Espionage

Industrial espionage can be really frustrating, especially when someone attempts to steal information when you share it with your business partners, thus there's a need of a few tips to be taken into consideration.

It is important that you maintain your internal network unexposed.

You have to transfer files in and out of the company without exposing your internal network. There shouldn't be any type of either direct or indirect communication between the partner and the company.

Make sure that the Information at Rest is safe

The main thing to keep in mind when you want to keep your information safe is to use encryption. The latter makes sure that the information cannot be read, thus you will be able to preserve its confidentiality.
The intermediate storage should be safe.

Whenever there is information that should be sent to a trade partner, but that information is stored on a computer, it is important to make sure the data is located in a safe place. Such practice is crucial in case the intermediate storage is found on an insecure network, for example on the Internet. While using encryption might help you keep private information secure, you cannot be sure that the data will not be intentionally deleted or altered. You may consider having only one information access channel to the storage space, being sure of the fact that only a strict protocol, which does not allow entering the code, is accessible for remote users.
Keeping information safe from deletion and loss

Deliberately or accidentally some important information can be deleted or altered. Thus it is crucial to maintain older versions so you could bring the deleted file back or correct the data that has been changed.
Protection from information manipulation

Information found within protected storage should be tamper proof through the incorporation of verification and access management that makes sure that only users who are allowed to change data can access it. Besides, if you want to make sure that the information tampering that finds a way around the access control is not overlooked, it is important that the digital signatures are used to identify unauthorized manipulations in data.

Tamper-proof auditing and monitoring

There are a number of reasons why meticulous monitoring and checking is very important for keeping private data secured:

- the company is certain that its policy is fulfilled;

- the owner of the data can trace the usage of the information;

- it helps protect against potential abusers, who are aware of the fact that tamper-proof auditing and monitoring has the ability of tracing the usage of information;

- it offers specific instruments to the security administrator, helping him to analyze security infrastructure, check its accurate execution and reveal unauthorized usage.
Ensuring safe end-to-end network

It is important that you keep information safe when transferring it throughout the network. The process itself should be protected, thus the access to the information should be available only to authorized users. You may also consider using complex authentication mechanisms.
Moments in History

Porcelain

The filmy but quite hard porcelain was discovered by the Chinese back in the 7^th century.

The Europeans gained access to making porcelain only in the 18^th century. It was one Catholic priest named d'Entrecolles who revealed the secret in Paris. Before coming back to Europe he was a Jesuit missionary in China and managed to visit the Kin Te-chen, which was the heart of the royal porcelain manufacture.

There the priest watchfully observed the whole process and wrote everything he noticed in letters which he later sent to Europe.

D'Entrecolles characterized his visits to Kin Te-chen and characterized in detail the location of the city, the way potter families lived in the secret city and the security measures undertaken there.

But most importantly he analyzed the whole process off creating porcelain.

The priest managed to send an example of china clay (one of the key raw materials of porcelain) to Europe, despite the strict security measures.

The Steam Engine

At the time of the discovery it was called "fire-engine". Its inventor was believed to be an English black-smith. Initially in 1711 the machine was constructed with the goal of pumping water out of mines. Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach was the one to reveal the secret of the mechanism by building an exact copy of the English steam engine. It was no surprise that Fischer paid a lot of attention to the fire engine since, while he was in England, the drainage of the Hungarian mines became relevant. He decided to dress as a worker and pay a visit to the factories located near Birmingham, where he carried out his measurements. Latter according to these estimations he was able to make drawings of his machine. When he came back to Vienna in 1722 his knowledge were far beyond the English steam engine, he had enough experience to be able to make good use of it. In 1722 Fischer built world's first steam engine. Later he constructed some more engines, a number of which proved to be rather useful in Hungarian mines.

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