Corporate Spying: Snooping, by Hook or by Crook

Corporate spies come in many guises, but they all have one thing in common: They want to use your company's secrets for competitive gain. This is a five-step guide to how snoops operate.

It also behooves the chief security officer to ensure that employees know not to talk about sensitive business in public places, and to work with the marketing department to make sure the risks of revealing information at a trade show don't outweigh the benefits of drumming up business.

And then there are those times when a company lets a near-stranger inside its doors for that most delicate of all conversations: the job interview. It's unlikely that competitors would risk directly sending someone on a job interview, but it is entirely possible that they could hire a questionable competitive intelligence firm to check things outor, more likely, hire a reputable competitive intelligence firm that contracts out its dirty work.

"They would go through the interview process to find out about what type of work the person would be assigned to and what kind of experience the company was looking for," explains Richard Heffernan, president of R.J. Heffernan Associates, who has done consulting for IP-intensive clients in the technology and biotech sectors. Heffernan's work includes educating employees about counterintelligence. "They'd try to find out as many scientific and technical details as possible," he says.

This cuts both ways. A competitor also might invite one of your employees in for a job interview with no other purpose than gleaning information about your processes.

As with comments made in public places, even the most offhand statements ("We were working on XYZ, but we're expecting to work on ABC next year") can be incredibly useful to a competitor, Heffernan explains. "If I know an area that a company has not been working on and why, I will not spend time trying to duplicate a lot of research; I will use a different path," he says.

Awareness training can be effective in plugging up this drip-drop of information, but only if it's targeted to the information that a specific group of employees needs to guard, Heffernan says. At a manufacturing facility, for instance, you might educate employees about the fact that a certain competitor is known to be working on a particular type of manufacturing technology. "I'd say, 'If that competitor were able to get this information, they would be able to move their process that much [further] forward,'" he says. "When you talk about something that engineers or scientists have worked on for a great deal of their life, and they see that it is at risk, they're very attentive to what you're talking about."Put It TogetherThis leads us to perhaps the trickiest part of protecting against competitive intelligence: that it's not only trade secrets that are valuable to your rivals. In some ways, in fact, trade secrets are easy to protect. Stealing them is illegal under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act. Employees usually know that they're valuable, and nondisclosure agreements may protect your company further. What's more complicated is helping employees understand how seemingly innocuous details can be strung together into a bigger picturehow that company phone list becomes a weapon in the hands of John Nolan.