Understanding the business changes of competitors is a major concern for some of the world's largest companies. They have an annual budget and manpower to deal with these issues. The intelligence they collect translates into strategic actions that affect sales, pricing, positioning, merchandising, and profits.
Some companies have gone beyond the legal boundaries of researching competitors. Illegal collection of information violates ethical guidelines. This illegal activity to obtain competitor information is called industrial espionage.
definition
Industrial espionage involves the secret activities of companies to obtain competitive information. They use this information to develop strategies to gain greater market share. Greater profits are the main goal of espionage in the corporate world.
The term corporate espion is equivalent to industrial espionage. Industrial espionage targets are competing companies or sometimes even government agencies that gain favor or gain important information.
A lot of money is lost to industrial espionage. Unfortunately, most companies have not reported industrial espionage incidents because of concerns about their stakeholders losing credibility.
Gold information
Competitors in the business will value any information they have about their peers. Strategy, product design, product defects, and business processes are among the most passionate information for competitors. Professional units process this information and forward it to top management for action.
Some companies use reverse engineering, where competitors buy and disassemble products so they can dissect their components for technical knowledge.
Customer databases are also important to competitors because they understand market behavior and implement more effective programs. If the competitor intercepts, other information about the bid, expansion plan and merger is crucial.
The collection methods vary. Some companies send their own employees to compete. The Internet has given way to higher-tech industrial espionage. Even the trash can is a gold mine that can get information about the competition business.
High-tech stealing
The most obvious way to espionage is to steal computer hard drives, laptops or invade competitors' offices. Available software can be installed in the system network of the game to record keystrokes. These keystrokes can be analyzed to decode the password and gain access to the personal profile of the employee who may be handling sensitive or critical locations. Spyware has evolved and has become more difficult to detect. The game may be watched without anyone else knowing.
Digital forensics can be used to point to sinful parties
Some competing employees can send files and delete them later. Unconsciously, these deleted files may no longer exist in the system, but the offender's activities are embedded in the hard drive. This means that deleted files can be recovered and spies can be responsible for their actions.
Computer experts use special tools. All that is needed is to mine the deleted content and study the possibilities and patterns of espionage. With these tools, every measure must be taken to deal with industrial espionage that could lead to a decline in productivity and market share.
Orignal From: The role of computer forensics in industrial espionage
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