The European Chamber of Commerce (EuroCham) in Vietnam will host a talk on preventing industrial espionage during a luncheon in Ho Chi Minh City next month.
Dr. Roman Hummelt of International Management Consultants (IMC) and author of “Industrial Espionage – Strategic Risks and Prevention” will discuss special risks of industrial espionage for foreign affiliates abroad and suggest several defense methods.
“Industrial Espionage – Causes and Prevention – Protection of Confidential Information in Foreign Affiliates” will be held on February 22 at Park Hyatt Saigon, 2 Lam Son Square, District 1.
The luncheon will cost members and co-hosts VND600,000 (US$30) per person, while non-members will have to pay VND900,000. Participants have to register online for the event.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The United Arab Emirates is strongly denying any link to an alleged spy ring uncovered by Oman, a neighbouring Gulf country.
A statement by the UAE’s foreign ministry says the nation is “shocked and surprised” by the claim and promises to assist Oman in any investigations. The statement was posted Monday by the state news agency WAM.
Oman on Sunday said it dismantled a spy ring linked to the UAE that targeted government and military operations.
Omani authorities have given no other details, but suggested that arrests have been made.
It marks a rare display of tensions between the close allies.
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 5:05 AM on 1st February 2011
A high-flying City banker gave his barrister wife and her friend
sensitive information on takeovers to help them make almost £600,000
from insider dealing, a court heard yesterday.
The three invested more than £2million in shares on the London Stock
Exchange between 2000 and 2008, netting a total profit of £590,000.
Christian Littlewood, 37, worked for German investment bank Dresdner
Kleinwort Wasserstein from 1998 until 2007, when he was made redundant.
Christian Littlewood (left) invested £2,150,000 and made a profit of £590,000 for himself, his wife, Angie Littlewood (right) and a friend through inside trading
He was privy to inside information on takeovers and passed it to his wife. The court heard he didn’t just use information he had been given – he also spied on colleagues’ computers and eavesdropped.
During his career he rose up the ranks, and was director of strategic banking by the time he left.
His expertise was in mergers and acquisitions and he passed on information about firms which were about to be taken over to his wife, Angela, 39, and her friend Helmy Sa’aid, 34. Mrs Littlewood and Sa’aid, owner of a juice bar, would invest in shares prior to takeovers, selling after the deals for a profit.
Southwark Crown Court heard that in March 2000 Littlewood began passing insider information to his spouse, a Singaporean national. She used her Singaporean name to trade, which was ‘convenient’, as it could not be linked easily to her husband.
Littlewood, who was earning £350,000 a year, including bonuses, in the last years of his employment, used knowledge he legitimately had, as he was ‘inside’ deals done through his bank.
Nicholas Dean, QC, prosecuting, said: ‘While Christian Littlewood was the instigator of the scheme, neither his wife nor Mr Sa’aid needed much persuasion. They became active participants.
‘Over a period of nine years they invested a total of £2,150,000, making a profit of £590,000.’
Mr Dean added that over the period Littlewood had been involved with investments in 56 stocks, 50 of them involving his co-defendants. But the three are only being sentenced in relation to the eight counts on the indictment.
Following his redundancy, Littlewood began working for another bank, Shore Capital. He fed information from the first deal he was involved in to his wife and Sa’aid. The Littlewoods, who have three children, were arrested at their London home on March 31, 2009.
Sa’aid was held on the Indian Ocean islands of Mayotte in May last year.
The couple pleaded guilty to eight counts of insider trading in October. Sa’aid admitted the same charges just before trial on January 10. Lord MacDonald QC, defending Littlewood, said that, although his client ‘lit the touch paper’, he did not know the extent to which his wife and Sa’aid were investing.
The three will be sentenced later this week. Sa’aid is in custody and the Littlewoods are on conditional bail.
China used honeytraps and spying interns in industrial espionage, according to leaked French intelligence files.
One report claimed a top researcher in a major French pharmaceutical company was wined and dined by a Chinese girl and ended up in bed with her.
“When he was shown the recorded film of the previous night in his hotel room . . . he proved highly co-operative,” said an economic intelligence official.
In another case, an unnamed French company realized too late that a sample of its patented liquid had left the building after the visit of a Chinese delegation. One of the visitors had dipped his tie into the liquid to take home a sample and copy it.
Companies should do more to protect themselves from prying eyes among the 30,000 Chinese students who conduct internships in France, experts warned.
Among the most frequent methods cited by French intelligence is the so-called “lamprey technique”, which usually takes the form of an international tender for business. “The aim of the project is to attract responses from developed countries,” notes the report. When Western companies vie to respond, they are cajoled and “told to improve their technical offering”.
“Each (company) tries to outdo the other, once, twice, several times until the Chinese consider they’ve had enough.” Once key information has been gathered, the bidders are told the project has been shelved and the information is used by the Chinese to develop its own products.
A prime example was a recent multi-billion dollar tender to build China’s high-speed train. France’s TGV was a bidder. As part of the process, the French embassy in Beijing organized a six-month training course for Chinese engineers. Soon afterwards China brought out its own high-speed train remarkably similar to the TGV and Germany’s ICE train.
Another technique is the “mushroom factory”, in which French industries create a joint venture with a local Chinese firm and transfer part of their technology. Later local rivals emerge, “offer identical products and are run by the Chinese head of the company that initiated the joint venture”. A third technique is to turn the tables on a foreign firm by accusing it of counterfeiting. Schneider Electric was taken to court over a hook in its fuse box, which it patented in 1996. Its Chinese rival Chint started building the same hook, took Schneider to court in China for copying its design and Schneider was ordered to pay a $49.5 million.
Renault, the French carmaker is embroiled in an espionage scandal involving three top executives over allegations they were paid to hand over car secrets to a Chinese firm.
Unsettling developments, on several fronts:
U.S. surveillance. The Obama administration, once again, is reaching farther than its predecessor on electronic surveillance. Now it wants a law requiring internet service providers to keep logs of their customers on the web — all of them, not suspected bad actors — just in case the government may want the data. Lots of ISPs keep logs already, but the government is trying to ensure that you can’t find one that offers greater privacy. This is not different in concept from requiring hotels and restaurants to install microphones and video recorders in every public space, lest the country’s 30 million existing surveillance cameras miss a spot. The Justice Department’s Jason Weinstein told Congress the proposed new law is — no, really — good for privacy:
… malicious cyber actors do not respect our laws or our privacy. The government has an obligation to prevent, disrupt, deter, and defeat such intrusions…Privacy interests can be undercut when data is not retained for a reasonable period of time, thereby preventing law enforcement officers from obtaining the information they need to catch and prosecute those criminals.
Can you spot the logical elision here? Surveillance is usually justified by reference to pedophiles and cyber spies, but most of the government’s data mining — involving hundreds of thousands of secret requests each year — do not even assert a reasonable suspicion that a customer has done anything wrong. The post-Patriot Act legal standard requires only that authorities can plausibly describe the information as “relevant to” an investigation. Authorities acknowledge that an enormous number of innocent Americans have had their private data swept up and stored (usually forever) in government archives.
Chinese cyber-spying. Government sponsored hackers in China appear to have impersonated National Journal‘s Bruce Stokes in a spear-phishing email attack on US diplomats. It’s a new twist on an old scheme, and it’s a reminder that you can’t assume the person on the “From” line is who he says he is:
The e-mails that seemed to come from Stokes contained a virus that, if opened, would have burrowed an electronic tunnel to the host computer, letting the intruder root around in the owner’s files and siphon off copies.
A minimum precaution: keep your anti-malware protections up to date, and install security updates for all your software as soon as they arrive.
Why I’ll Probably Be Locked Out of Facebook Soon. Facebook means well with its new security plan, which authenticates suspicious log-on attempts by asking users to identify photos of their friends. But there are “friends” and friends. Readers of my book on Dick Cheney often friend me, and I couldn’t name one of them by sight. And what about all those friends of yours whose profile pictures are babies and animals? Pick ten random names from your friends list. Could you pass Facebook’s new test?
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