Business Espionage - The South Africa Report

SA - As the current Sony-North Korea tit-for-tat game attests, industrial espionage has now been brought to an open space, and its debilitating consequences are evident – including in South Africa...

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Industrial espionage is the least-known concept within the intelligence compendium, although many agencies are now involved in this activity... Several private businesses have been mentioned in cases involving illegal theft of commercial information. This attests to the fact that in modern societies, as was the case in earlier centuries, economic intelligence is an integral aspect of business, albeit as a business risk.

Studies conducted under the auspices of the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa for several years have found that industrial espionage in SA is on the rise...

SA-specific accounts of industrial espionage are mostly contained in business publications...

For example, in 2003, The Star reported that British American Tobacco SA (BATSA) conducted spying activities on its rival, Apollo Tobacco; and Finsettle, a subsidiary of Barnard Jacobs Mellet, stole business information secrets of CST Outsourcing. In March 2014, Business Day reported on a suspected case of industrial espionage practices of BATSA involving spy networks and payment of agents by the JSE-listed company. The inference is that industrial espionage is a burgeoning business strategy in SA.
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