Largest Israeli Corporate Espionage Scandal Ever!
Yesterday a large corporate espionage investigation has been revealed on Israeli news authorities and many top executives from leading corporations have been arrested and invited for formal investigations at police HQ - YES, Pele-Phone, Cellcom execs arrested for computer espionage. Among the suspected companies you can find the top names of the leading telecom companies in Israel as well as other leading food and consumer goods companies in our little business landscape.
What reported in brief is that many of these top executives ordered a “service” offered by a private investigation firm to conduct espionage on target competitors by using a “smart” software product that works as a trojan horse installed on competitors’ computers. This “trojan horse” was installed un-intentionally by executives from the competitor companies, either by “innocent” files received by email or as a gift software packages, where after installed started to serve its operators for retrieve files from the competitor file servers. The report says that the most important files where retrieved including personal documents of CEO and other top management.
This is the largest corporate espionage scandal ever happened in Israel (Although still under investigation) and it takes down the “best” names and the most credible top executives in our local industry.
My thoughts on this:
1) This is very bad for Israel as a small economy trying to fit into global markets both in terms of reputation and level of business ethics and I think we all will pay for it “high price” in the near future.
2) The service as described in local news cost the companies who ordered it less then 500$! I guess now it will cost them more!
3) The “group” behaviour in this scandal makes it even worse. If it was one “bad guy” then people could say it can happen even in the most ethical places. Now that it seemed to be a “normal” business conduct for these companies and top executives it does raise a “business moral” question.
On a personal note, I can only hope that investigation will be thorough and justice will be served!
Update: This wide security breach makes you think about IT security investments and their effectiveness (Especially here in Israel, the so called security innovation “spring”). This kind type of threats seems to me as something that can serve as a good basis for a new breed of security tools that deal with trojan horses that are already installed inside corporate networks and transmit sensitive material on-demand to computers outside the network. The weak link here is the loose connection between the network activity and the file system activity while when tied logically together they present a misuse and when kept separated are harmless.
Update: A startup aiming to solve this just raised funds - PortAuthority.
