What is Espionage? – Protecting IPs and Trade Secrets in Modern World

26 February 2025

Establishing a company today involves a lot of careful planning and execution, but all your hard work and efforts may end in sadness if you don't take care of your IPs and trade secrets. These are the things that make you stand apart from others, but unfortunately, there have been multiple cases of thefts that have led to a complete shutdown of companies. In this blog, we are exploring how these thefts take place and what they are called in the corporate world.

What Does Espionage Mean?

Espionage or corporate espionage is a term that refers to the theft of an organisation's proprietary information, intellectual property, or trade secrets for financial or commercial benefits. This theft is often done by cyber attackers or the organisation's insiders. The purpose of stealing such information is mostly to trade it with the organisation's competitors. And if the competitors aren't honest enough, they accept such trade and pay the stealer for the data.

What are the Common Types of Corporate Espionage?

While many types of business espionage exist, there are two very clearly defined ones, which are:

Intellectual Property Acquisition

Intellectual property or IP is to get the rights of an innovation you have done and don't want others to copy. When a third party compromises these IPs, it is called an IP theft. It is one of the most common types of business espionage and can lead to significant organisational loss. For example, once, there was a case when a Coca-Cola employee got access to their secret technique to make Coke and tried selling it to competitors, none other than Pepsi. However, Pepsi complained about it to Coca-Cola, leading to the employee's arrest.

Trade Secret Theft

The other type of espionage is stealing a company's trade secrets. These secrets can be any information an organisation doesn't want to be available in the public domain. But this information doesn't stay in a cabinet. Instead of moving from one employee to another or any other parties, these people mutually agree not to disclose the information to a third party. However, since the information is contained in various forms like an email, an sms, a file, etc, it makes it hard to protect all of them from potential theft.

What are the Methods of Corporate Espionage?

Now, let's talk about how espionage takes place. While it's been a practice in the business world for a long time, the methods have drastically changed. There was a time when stealing IP or trade secrets was involved in a theft, just like a thief does. But today, as digital formats and the internet have made it easy to store things online in servers, making their accessibility a lot easier, espionage methods have also changed. Here are some of the most common business espionage methods used today:

• Unauthorised Access: As the name suggests, it occurs when someone gets unauthorised access to a company's information and data. It's mostly done by unethical hackers who look for vulnerabilities in your system, processes, endpoints, or IT infrastructure. In such attacks, the hacker first gets the information, which is enough to get unauthorised access, and then uses it to get further information, such as IPs and trade secrets.
• Phishing: It is a comparatively common method of espionage. In this method, an email is sent to an employee or any other member of the organisation. The email is posed as a legitimate email from a trusted sender by using techniques like email spoofing or domain spoofing. Now, the email contains malicious content like links or files, which provides the cyber attacker with access to the company's network and information.
• SQL Injection: SQL injection is a more technical way to get a company's IPs and trade secrets. As the name refers, it involves an SQL code to manipulate the organisation's SQL-based backend, where all the information, like credentials, is stored. The hacker using this technique can modify the data in the backend and save it to other places.
• Insider Threat: One of the most common and traditional methods of espionage is insider threat. It occurs when an insider, such as an employee, steals the organisation's data and leaks it into the public domain or sells it to competitors. Since an insider gets involved in this method, it's relatively hard to detect such theft, which leads to heavy losses.

How to Deal with Business Espionage?

Dealing with espionage once it happens requires going with the legal route, and it's very hard. That's why preventing espionage or any other cyber crime in the first place is very crucial. To prevent corporate espionage, here are a few things to ensure:

Create a Clear User Policy

Since you can't stop using emails, SMS, etc., you can establish a clear policy for the usage, transfer, and access of data. Mention how data should be used and transferred, what should not be done with data, and where data should not be uploaded at all. With these do's and do n'ts, also mention the consequences of a data breach if someone is found guilty.

Use Business Grade Antivirus

For the protection of your employees' systems from phishing attacks and other hacking attempts, a business-grade antivirus is best. However, get an antivirus from a trusted provider and not from untrusted sources.

Hire IT Support and Managed Cyber Security Services

Establishing IT support for your organisation can be pricey, but with remote IT support, you can ensure that your employees have access to great support around the clock. This ensures security in case of phishing attempts.

Moreover, to ensure the safety of your organisation's network and information, you can get managed cyber security services. These services ensure that your network is not infiltrated by suspicious people.

Final Words

To sum up, this is how we can define corporate espionage and it can be a nightmare for any organisation, and that's why it's important to prevent it from happening. With the ways we discussed above, you can absolutely safeguard yourself from potential espionage. However, to handle the technical aspects, like managing your organisation's cybersecurity, you can rely on Renaissance forever.