Business Security: How to Detect and Prevent Industrial Espionage?

Item: Business Security: How to Detect and Prevent Industrial Espionage?
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Author: Jessie Mitchell

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A company’s confidential data can hold significant value for its competitors. Whether it contains trade secrets or financial, client and marketing information, it can help the competitor gain a competitive advantage by stealing it illegally or unethically. For the sake of gaining a greater market share and increased profits, you never know when your business is posed with an insider threat or a cyber risk.

Although, you can invest in counter-surveillance tools from a spy store or an online risk management software for this purpose, detecting and preventing industrial espionage regularly should be of utmost importance.

Therefore, this article will provide you with tips on detecting and preventing corporate espionage to help keep your business secure. Read below to learn!

Table of Contents

How to Detect Industrial Espionage?

Your business can always be at risk of economic espionage, hence, risk assessment strategies should be an integral part of your system.

The first and foremost step for risk assessment should be identifying your most valuable data and potential targets. It could be your upcoming marketing campaign, research and development strategies, etc.

Assessing and monitoring risks on the basis of probability and severity of risks will help you in creating the right risk assessment strategies and corrective action plans in case of a breach.

How to Prevent Industrial Espionage?

1. Ensure Customer Data Privacy

Your competitors may intentionally leak your customer’s critical personal data to tarnish your business reputation and reduce customer base and market share.

Hence, you should invest in robust data privacy solutions online that are equipped with various efficient features to make sure your customers’ data is compliant with local data privacy laws.

2. Incorporate Employee Monitoring Software

Your employees may be one of the biggest threats to your company. Therefore, ongoing monitoring of your employees by using relevant software should be made essential.

Moreover, if the employees know that they are being monitored, it will deter them from stealing critical data.

You can easily find employee monitoring software online, and they will help you in keeping check of their online activity such as browser history, application usage, file downloads, and more.

3. Conduct Background Checks

Before recruiting any kind of worker in your company, you must conduct a background check. This will prevent you from hiring employees with bad intentions or moles.

Background checks should also be made regularly. For example, if you discover that one of your employees is contacting your competitor, or they recently had a large deposit in their bank account, you should be skeptical about it and take necessary actions accordingly.

4. Train Your Employees

Your employees should be well-trained and educated regarding the processing, usage, and storage of the company’s sensitive data.

You should also remind them about the threats your company can face in case of a breach and the consequences they may have to face if they are responsible for it.

Educating them on different ways to keep the critical data protected from spying competitors will also be beneficial for your company.

A manual containing all the procedures and policies that concern trade secrets and other important data should be made available to everyone in the company as well.