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Pharma Business How I Can Steal Your Competitive Secrets P By Jonathan Snyder harma companies, looking to capitalize on the global demand for their products, pour billions into R&D; hoping to develop the key ingredients needed to solve, or at least reduce, mass population killers. The demand is enormous, the rewards are enormous, and as a result, this market is fertile ground for the theft of trade secrets. As a leader in your industry, your primary goal is to find cures to some of the world's most menacing medical issues; however, a close second goal is to drive revenue. As an intelligence and espionage professional, whether you are my target or the "nest" I am trying to protect, my goal is to penetrate your corporate risk management and security infrastructure to either steal or "test penetrate" your protected data or personnel. How would I accomplish my goal? There are many common methods to steal your competitive secrets. The first and foremost method in this rapidly evolving digital age is the penetration of your technology. At a recent security seminar presented by Nova Southeastern University and the FBI Miami Division, the chief information officer for one of the world's renowned IT security leaders, RSA, stated, "The new focus of technology security professionals is to quickly identify and mitigate network intrusions — not prevent intrusions." Today we know that 60 LifeScienceLeader.com even the most robust IT security devices cannot prevent all the sophisticated and overwhelming data-intrusion attempts. The goal is to identify the electronic thieves quickly, eliminate their presence, assess the damage, and attempt to harden the penetration points. A scary fact is that the average electronic spy has spent 34 days inside a network before the penetration is even detected. Putting this statistic in context, imagine a criminal being inside of your home for a month monitoring everything you are doing while going undetected! Several other ways to steal your secrets traverse various areas of the organized crime realm. A highly simplistic yet powerful tool is the phenomenon known as "dumpster diving." Most organizations literally dump their proprietary secrets into their corporate trash bins without regard to who is waiting to score big on a critical formula, investment report, or interoffice memo that will identify who is critical to the research. All of this info provides key insights for spies to develop an attack plan to acquire secrets. A parallel thought to the dumpster dive concept is the identification of key employees and their home residences. Monitoring their homes, where most people put their guard down, is another step September 2013 in the process of stealing secrets. The average person becomes complacent with corporate security initiatives while working at home. In fact, company security policies are difficult, if not impossible, to impose on an employee's home turf. As an example, most homes have wireless routers installed, which all have included security, but most people only know to password protect the actual wireless broadcast. What they fail to password protect is the manufacturer's standard "admin" login Internet protocol. What this does is provide espionage agents the ability to bypass the wireless security protocols and gain access to all home computer systems. Examples also relate to the trash put out in the regular bins by the homeowners; they would never think of someone purposely looking for their company secrets in their home trash. THE SECURITY RISKS OF CLINICAL TRIAL MEETINGS Another successful way to penetrate an organization's proprietary info is to track its numerous clinical trial meetings and the panelists involved in those meetings. As someone who has provided security and counter-intelligence services to many organizations globally, including pharma, I have witnessed scientific leaders who