Corporate counterespionage is also espionage.
The case of the alleged industrial espionage that broke out within the Ferretti Group, where the executive director Xu Xinyu discovered he was wiretapped and shadowed, teaches us that corporate security is an aspect of business efficiency that should not be taken lightly.
I wrote “alleged industrial espionage” because, from what I have read in the media, as a corporate Italian private investigator I can think of at least two other scenarios that could have caused the accident; it should not be forgotten that the line between counterespionage and espionage is very thin, and so is the line between defensive corporate investigations and illicit interference in the lives of employees.
The fact that, following an anti-espionage environmental sweep, a bug was found in the office of the senior manager, without also having detected spyware in his devices, suggests two things:
- Either we are dealing with a somewhat âgée and not very up-to-date, as well as inefficient, spy.
- Or, for some reason, they were targeting exclusively some of the director’s conversations.
Corporate espionage, which my detective agency Octopus in Italy deals with, has largely replaced telephone and environmental interceptions with electronic and computer ones for years now, mainly for two reasons:
- Communications from landlines have mostly moved to mobile networks and messaging applications.
- Listening (in real time or pre-recorded wiretapping) of everything one’s target says on the phone or in a meeting is a huge effort for the spy, often penalized by the fact that many speeches could be allusive and should be supplemented by intercepting emails and messages.
Over the past five years, almost all corporate espionage cases uncovered by my Italian detective agency Octopus involved almost exclusively the interception of documents and chats.
The Ferretti case is also anomalous because a manager who discovers that he is being wiretapped and followed, if assisted by the private detectives of the Octopus Italian detective agency (s well as I hope by any of my colleagues) would be advised to stay away from the media and to engage elaborate counter-surveillance and counter-information operations.
Counterintelligence investigations of Italian Detective Agency Octopus are based on cutting-edge technology, discretion, counter-surveillance, counter-information, and not underestimating the human factor, which is still predominant today despite the enormous technical possibilities