From F1 with the case of McLaren stealing Ferrari’s technical designs to the most basic of 
products, spying and stealing of corporate secrets has been around as long as competition. In my Modern Business Topics class this past Saturday we discussed corporate espionage and the effects of this kind of activity on business and how companies combat this. In addition to this we heard from individuals about cases they were aware of herein Taiwan in their own companies. Many of the cases involved the typical sorts of behaviors greedy people display such as a salesperson leaving the company and taking their customers with them to their new company. However, some of the cases that most shocked us were those where companies were ‘spying’ on their
employees- including wire-tapping- such as the case a couple of years ago at HP. No longer is it uncommon for companies to protect their assets by monitoring email and restricting the use of removable drives- both flash drives and larger portable hard drives. But the case of the hard drives sold by Seagate with a pre-installed Trojan virus which would connect to the Internet and transmit all the data on the drive to Mainland Chinese websites certainly was the most interesting of the ‘corporate’ espionage cases. 
While electronic surveillance of the physical and virtual world of companies is commonplace- i.e. CCTV cameras, motion detectors, and a LAN protected with firewalls, etc. However, all this is not enough to protect from the ingenuity of spies and their methods for accessing company secrets if they really want the information. What is the solution? It seems that as long as there is greed, there will remain th
e threat of stealing information.
products, spying and stealing of corporate secrets has been around as long as competition. In my Modern Business Topics class this past Saturday we discussed corporate espionage and the effects of this kind of activity on business and how companies combat this. In addition to this we heard from individuals about cases they were aware of herein Taiwan in their own companies. Many of the cases involved the typical sorts of behaviors greedy people display such as a salesperson leaving the company and taking their customers with them to their new company. However, some of the cases that most shocked us were those where companies were ‘spying’ on their
employees- including wire-tapping- such as the case a couple of years ago at HP. No longer is it uncommon for companies to protect their assets by monitoring email and restricting the use of removable drives- both flash drives and larger portable hard drives. But the case of the hard drives sold by Seagate with a pre-installed Trojan virus which would connect to the Internet and transmit all the data on the drive to Mainland Chinese websites certainly was the most interesting of the ‘corporate’ espionage cases. 
While electronic surveillance of the physical and virtual world of companies is commonplace- i.e. CCTV cameras, motion detectors, and a LAN protected with firewalls, etc. However, all this is not enough to protect from the ingenuity of spies and their methods for accessing company secrets if they really want the information. What is the solution? It seems that as long as there is greed, there will remain th
e threat of stealing information. 
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