(see URL for entire story)
http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/98/apr/0403/feat.htm?st.ne.fd.mnaw
Low tech spooks - Corporate spies
By Adam L. Penenberg
In his slightly crumpled brown uniform, Richard Jones looked like any
typical deliveryman, bringing in a new batch of urgently needed office
supplies to corporations everywhere. But Jones, who was heading for the
parking lot of a major chipmaker's border town maquiladora, only looked
the part. Everything about him that day was made up.
His uniform, "A close match, but not perfect," he would recall later, the
office supplies--paper, pens and toner cartridges--picked up from a local
stationery store. Even his name was fictional.
As Jones took a final deep breath and carried the supplies into the
company's air-conditioned chill, a security guard took one look at the
brown uniform and lazily waved him through to the office manager's office.
Jones had already contacted the delivery company and, pretending to be
from the semiconductor company, had canceled that week's delivery run.
If the office manager had any suspicions, they were quickly allayed.
"Where's Raymond?" she asked.
"Family problems," Jones said. "He had to take a couple weeks off."
And that was that. The office manager showed Jones around the entire
premises, pointing out photocopiers, fax machines, bookshelves, supply
cabinets that had to be resupplied and the offices of executives. She even
got him coffee.
What was the point of the charade? Jones, not his real name, is a
corporate spook. A rival company had paid him to obtain the semiconductor
company's forthcoming quarterly earnings before they were announced. The
fee: a nifty $35,000.
Concerned about hackers, theft of proprietary company software and
industrial espionage, American companies spent $6.3 billion on computer
security last year, according to DataQuest. And the market is expected to
grow to an estimated $13 billion by 2000. Yet for all these corporate
firewalls, encryption schemes and antihacker technologies, corporate spies
like Jones have little trouble sneaking in the back way to get what they
want.
Better technologies and a higher caliber of spies have made this arena
very lucrative. One reason: the end of the Cold War. Shrinking military
and intelligence budgets meant that even spooks were forced to send out
résumés and pound the pavement in search of jobs.
Many former Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and
Defense Intelligence Agency employees have sought refuge in the corporate
world, often heading their own companies. They even have their own trade
organization: the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, or
SCIPs.
"The scope of the problem is enormous," says Ira Winkler, security
consultant and author of Corporate Espionage. "On any one day there are a
few hundred people engaged in breaking into companies and stealing
information in this country. I can literally walk into a company and
within a few hours walk out with billions of dollars."
[continued...]
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Received on Sun Apr 5 00:37:43 1998