Corporate espionage on the rise in Ohio
CLEVELAND – The threat of foreign espionage seemingly disappeared with the Cold War. But there is a new spy game in town.
“Now you’re talking about economic espionage and that is one of the biggest threats to national security that we have,” said Brad Beman, head of the counter intelligence unit for the Cleveland branch of the FBI.
Beman warns that today’s spies are just as interested in the office computer as government secrets.
“Other countries that are not necessarily friendly to the United States are gaining out technology and gaining an edge potentially over us,” Beman said.
Some of the most dangerous spies don’t work for foreign governments, but for local companies. Employees motivated by revenge, money or patriotism are betraying company secrets, according to the FBI.
At Lubrizol in Brecksville, a disgruntled employee, Kyung Kim, sold trade secrets to a competitor in his native South Korea two years ago in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another South Korean native, Kue Sang Chun, a former researcher at NASA Glenn, has admitted to using his credentials to acquire high tech infrared technology for another company to send to a company in his homeland.
Eric Vanderburg, an expert in information security at JurInnov, a Cleveland company that investigates corporate espionage, said theft of trade secrets is a more significant in Cleveland than most realize and happens more often than companies care to admit. Some foreign and domestic companies looking for an edge over the competition hire social engineers.
“A social engineer is a person who’s going to use persuasion to get you to divulge information or perform some action for them,” Vanderburg said.
Social engineers scour the Internet looking for someone to manipulate or even blackmail into divulging company secrets, making the coworker in the next cubicle or the neighbor next door a spy. But local companies aren’t the only targets of economic espionage.
“A lot of our research’s conducted at the university level and it’s unclassified research, which means that it’s much less protected and it’s easier for people to get access to it,” Beman said.
Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.