Industrial espionage is now considered a branch of competitive intelligence, although only a few years ago people saw a difference between the two.
This view was expressed to Obozrevatel by Yuriy Syvytsky, a member of the supervisory board of Intecracy Group.
It used to be thought that collecting data in line with ethical standards was competitive intelligence, while a competitor who stopped at nothing was engaged in espionage, the expert noted.
In his opinion, it is far more effective for a business not to spend money on spy programs to study its competitors, but to do its own job professionally, bringing in qualified specialists and studying publicly available information.
"Today, with the development of IT, there is no fundamental difference," the expert says. "An information system for collecting and processing information is not a person. And nobody taught it ethical standards. In the case of the French and BMW, a crude method was used. Evidently, all attempts to gain access to the competitor's information by hacking into the corporate system had failed. Most likely, the engineers' computers were simply not connected to the internet and exchanged information within their own secure network."
Computers used for development usually have no way of inserting a flash drive and contain no hard drive (they are connected to a server located in a separate room protected like a bank vault), Syvytsky noted.
However, according to him, such solutions are expensive and out of reach for start-up entrepreneurs who want to make money from their inventions. He therefore advises such entrepreneurs to take precautions: use one computer to communicate with the outside world and do their work (with drawings, program code and so on) on another one that is not connected to the internet.
Source: Obozrevatel