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.

Consider this scenario: Nolan once had a client who wanted him to find out whether any rivals were working on a certain technology. During his research of public records, he came across nine or 10 people who had been publishing papers on this specialized area since they were grad students together. Suddenly, they all stopped writing about the technology. Nolan did some background work and discovered that they had all moved to a certain part of the country to work for the same company. None of that constituted a trade secret or even, necessarily, strategic information. But Nolan saw a picture forming.

"What that told us was that they had stopped [publishing information about the technology] because they recognized that the technology had gotten to a point where it was probably going to be profitable," Nolan says. Then, by calling the people on the phone, going to meetings where they were speaking on other topics, and asking them afterward about the research they were no longer speaking publicly about, Nolan's firm was able to figure out when the technology would hit the market. This information, he says, gave his client a two-year heads up on the competition's plans.

Still hard to fathom? Then challenge yourself to think like a spy and apply it to your own company. Suppose you work for a cement manufacturing company, and you and your rivals are bidding on a big contract with the Pakistani government, says Ira Winkler, chief security strategist at Hewlett-Packard and author of Corporate Espionage, who spent 11 years working with the National Security Agency. The intelligence goal, Winkler says, is to learn what your rivals are bidding so that you can undercut their prices. During the week the government has asked people to come make presentations, you chat up the staff at nice hotels in Islamabad, to find out if there are any guests from cement companies. Better yet, Winkler says, "If you know the name of the person who's the vice president of development for Europe/East Asia for your competitor, you could call up the hotel and ask if Mr. So-and-So is going to be there next week." Once you know who else is bidding, "you go to their customers and ask how much the competitor sold them cement for, saying you're willing to cut them a break."

And if those customers have confidentiality agreements in place? Well, you could always pay the hotel cleaning staff $25 to let you into the executive's room for 10 minutes, where you could hide a microphone or take pictures of documents. The rival would never knoweven, perhaps, after losing the bid.