HOWTO Commit Corporate Espionage

bart_scriv writes "Worried about who might be spying at your company? Businessweek looks at the latest in espionage gadgets and technology in response to the recent HP boardroom scandal. The article looks at devices designed for counter-espionage, which range from mundane confidential email services to sophisticated camera and listening-device detectors. '...for every method of spying, there's a counteroffensive. One of them is the eavesdropping protection kit, manufactured by Dynasound in Norcross, Ga. To secure a room in an office building, devices are placed on ceiling plenums, floors, HVAC ducts, doors, walls or windows — basically anywhere voices can travel.'"

Comments

Yeah, that'll work

[Aliencow]

WHO GOES THERE? Another protection: vanishing e-mail. Called VaporStream, the system lets people send e-mails that cannot be tracked, copied, forwarded, or printed--leaving no trail. Users pay $39.99 a year to subscribe to the service and must log into the site every time they want to send a confidential e-mail. Wow, I'm sure nobody will ever find a way to print it out or take a screenshot of it.

Re:Yeah, that'll work

[russ1337]

So how can we be sure this service isn't an NSA honeypot?

Re:Yeah, that'll work

[owlnation]

Yes, but since the major preoccupations of anyone who works in Corporatia are, "covering your ass" and "passing the buck", I don't think that anyone will have any use for email you can't store and use as a future weapon against one of your backstabbing brown-nosing colleagues.

Re:If you comply you should have nothing to hide

[eln]

If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?

Because I don't like to be spied on. The thought of people going through my personal files or even listening in on my private conversations creeps me out. I also don't like to use public restrooms with the stall door open, and I don't live in a completely transparent house.

If I'm a business, I want privacy because I don't want my competitors learning information about my future plans or strategies that they could use to their advantage. If I have a product that I've spent billions researching and developing, I don't want my competitor to steal it and start selling it before I do.

Re:If you comply you should have nothing to hide

[aplusjimages]

If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?

The government always follows this saying with "Do as I say not as we do." BTW Nice sig.

Gadgets and HP Scandal

[Narcogen]

What does one have to do with the other? The HP scandal revolves around a leak at the very top-- a member of the board of directors who supplied inside information directly to journalists. What the heck do all these amateurish gadgets have to do with anything? And how is being aware of them or being able to protect oneself from them of any value when one of your own board members is giving information to the press? There's no technological silver bullet for that kind of problem. Trying to connect these two subjects is just silly.

Re:Gadgets and HP Scandal

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot

News for^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Nerds.^H^H Stuff that matters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Re:Great lengths at great heights

[Lumpy]

and every bit of it thwarted easily in a low tech way....

Find a IT guy that is disgruntled, (not hard at any company) and either pay him for a copy ofthe CEO's laptop contents or other tidbits.

$10,000.00 cash waved in front of a IT guy that is training his indian outsourced replacement or hearing of the cost cutting changes that management is goign to aim for would be all over that low risk bit of work.

Hell I bet you could get entire copies of the accounting database for the right amount of money.

All you need is someone on the inside being treated poorly and you have your circumvention to all the security.

Re:Interestingly

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the Netherlands, and a former colleague told me he was offered a IT job once by an US company into "filter software", you know, monitor your employees surfing behaviour etc., but in reality it turned out to be the NSA. They wanted him to outsource him to work "on location" at one of their biggest customers, a huge oil company. They told him getting in and getting the job was easy because the head of IT was also employed by them... They also told him they were in a lot of countries and governments, offering services but in reality installing Echelon backdoors. If anything he said was true, it would mean the US has direct access to all digital information of a lot of major companies and economies in the world.

PS He didn't take the job because he would have been a pawn. A year later, the company was "gone" and the site even non existent on archive.org.

Re:If you comply you should have nothing to hide

[GWBasic]

If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?

I'm hoping your questions is rhetorical. Let me give you a few examples:

• Richard Nixon bugged John Lennon because he was a political opponent.
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the CIA's watch list.
• Illegal != evil. There are illegal activities in the USA that aren't evil. In order to avoid debate, I'll point to the past example of alcohol prohibition. Back in the 1920s, it was illegal to call up your buddy to sample his latest brew, although not evil.
• I don't want my bank account information in any database that isn't mine.
• Some people would prefer to keep their phone sex conversations private.