Counterespionage Solutions
Ensuring the Integrity of your Confidential Information
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The defence community faces significant challenges. Ongoing operations, severely constrained budgets and the need for radical performance improvement in acquisition and programme management are currently driving defence agendas around the world.
The defence and security industry is facing its most challenging times ever. One of the tier one threats identified by the National Security Review in October 2010, centres around espionage - cyber crime.
“Government, the private sector and citizens are under sustained cyber attack today from both hostile states and criminals. They are stealing our intellectual property, sensitive commercial and government information....”
The Government’s announcement of a £650 million budget earmarked for a cyber security initiative, addresses the growing threat of cyber attacks and higlights the threat faced from espionage. But is this current preoccupation with cyber espionage leaving our defence interests vulnerable to the more traditional espionage threats?
What is important to understand is that all too often, traditional espionage techniques are being utilised to facilitate many of the cyber attacks we are reading about in today’s news. Illegal intelligence gathering via illicit surveillance devices or through the retrieval of documents from rubbish bins from example can yield an incredible amount of sensitive information that can then be used to implement a cyber attack. And the recruitment of a mole, deployed to steal information often totally undetected, has been widely reported throughout history.
Traditionally, espionage was the way in which spies acquired an enemy’s military secrets and this still appears to be the case. In 2010, 11 Chinese espionage cases were prosecuted in the United States. Ten of the 11 cases involved technology acquisition, and five were overt attempts to purchase and illegally export encryption devices, mobile-phone components, high-end analog-to-digital converters, microchips designed for aerospace applications and radiation-hardened semiconductors. Xian Hongwei and someone known as "Li Li" were arrested in September 2010 for allegedly attempting to purchase those aerospace-related microchips from BAE Systems, which is one of the companies involved in the development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
It has also been reported that former Eurocopter executive “Werner G.” allegedly met with a Russian SVR intelligence agent several times between 2004 and 2006 in Germany, Austria and Croatia, handing over unclassified technical manuals, files and CD-ROMs in exchange for EUR 13,000.
For the defence industry it has meant the need to address issues relating to espionage at board level and as part of the business resilience and continuity strategy.
Esoteric’s extensive experience in providing strategic board level support to global organisations has helped many of our defence and security industry clients to realise the value of having peace of mind in outsourcing their business resilience planning to Esoteric.
Our clients are able to concentrate on core business activity, safe in the knowledge that the threat of attempted or actual attacks from foreign states, competitors, criminals and terrorists has been minimised.
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