Perpetrators of corporate and industrial espionage get close to the data by entering through the least monitored yet most advantageous jobs for spying, such as janitor, mailroom and senior management positions.
Spying within corporations is nothing new. It has been going on for decades, however new technology is making the damage they can cause more pronounced. Companies and corporations must remain vigilant at all times.
Today operatives posing as janitors, mailroom employees, or even IT (Internet Technology) staff can skirt efforts to defend data, using their broad access to walk huge amounts of data right out the door.
Many corporations today perform the simplest of background and reference checks and don’t do enough digging into the prospects past to uncover ulterior motives.
Even some government contractors who routinely deal with classified information are lax in the security protocols. Often they “rely almost exclusively on the background checks provided through contractors an the security clearance processes they don’t really understand or over watch”, explained one security expert I talked to recently, who asked that I not use his name for reasons which were well explained at the beginning of our interview.
Spies who engage in corporate espionage often look for weaknesses and dive through the cracks between the typical components of most background checks. “Other outsource everything to companies they really don’t know and can’t trust.
One company who outsourced its entire cleaning and janitorial staff in an effort to save costs were surprised to learn that a worker of that new contracting organization was secretly going through the trash, accessing records and stealing client information, which cost them millions later on.
See related video: Janitor steals laptop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNuuU6re8cU
“You must vet lower level employees as you would senior management”, the expert warned. “This however is not done in most cases.”
It’s far easier to infiltrate a company as a lower level employee such as a janitor or mailroom staff member where the criteria is much lower and spy than it is to enter the organization in a senior leadership or management position.
See related video: Investigating Corporate Espionage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw1O_Fm5Vu8
See video: U.S. Corporations Enlist Ex-Intelligence Agents to Spy on Nonprofit Groups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzdIfgaf_eI