Corporate espionage goes undetected, unsolved in India
RAVI BHASIN
Corporate espionage goes undetected, unsolved in India
The Business Standard, February 10, 2007
The arrest of a VSNL employee for allegedly leaking information to a competing company is one of the few cases of corporate espionage to have come to light.
However, a majority of corporate espionage cases go undetected. If detected, very few complaints come to light. And in the few cases that complaints are registered, hardly any action is taken.
Moreover, there have been very few convictions in India till date for corporate espionage or data theft, while not a single case has been registered under Section 66 of the IT Act 2000 — the recent online ticket booking fraud cases where airlines were duped, a case in point.
In data theft cases, proving the crime is difficult. Besides, it could span across countries, under different jurisdictions, making it more difficult for law enforcement agencies.
Corporate espionage (online or offline) is any activity that a company carries out to obtain information about its current, potential or future competitors through illegal, unethical or immoral means. The problem is that even in the most digitised of companies, over 70 per cent of information is still in non-digital forms.
Companies that invest heavily in firewalls and other protection measures forget that over 15 per cent of their employees are talking to headhunters and prospective new employers at that very moment, say experts.
Companies are even using annual maintenance (AMC) contractors to plant surveillance software in rival firms. The software gives a daily log of the data via e-mail. Corporates have not woken to this fact despite the fact that the law (unless for national security purposes) does not permit this.
There are sophisticated bug-detectors and eavesdropping protection kits. Besides, there's the vanishing e-mail called VaporStream —a system that lets people send e-mails that cannot be tracked, copied, forwarded, or printed—leaving no trail.