Industrial espionage: window of opportunity

Abstract

Technological solutions cannot completely protect companies and governments from human actors driven by money, greed, or simply the thrill of the steal. In fact, each technological countermeasure for industrial espionage is itself the product of human decision-making attempting to preempt and inhibit the decisions and actions of the industrial spy. Nobody knows for sure who the spy is. And the spy doesn’t know for sure that he hasn’t already been detected or, even if he hasn’t, whether his plans will succeed, and his desired payoffs attained. Searching, deciding, detecting, and stopping the industrial spy when both sides of the game face risk and uncertainty is the subject matter of this paper. We focus on closing the spy’s window of opportunity.