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Pharma Business were very nonchalant about protecting data secrets. Simply stated, foreign soil is a hotbed for data theft. Penetration of hotel rooms, listening devices planted into meeting rooms, and the infamous "honey trap" (i.e. using sexual exploitation to get what you want) are all methods of espionage that seem to work with endless success. The adversary who has targeted your organization thrives on organizational and vendor tendencies to be complacent and naïve. The goal of espionage agents is to remain undetected, which results in their best work. The more complacent or arrogant the target, the better chances of theft success. A simple example of an environment at risk for a security breach is a hotel meeting room with the window curtains wide open. Such places provide corporate spies an opportunity to steal your secrets with the proper surveillance equipment. Simply closing the meeting room curtains can usually prevent laser surveillance equipment from picking up the conversations of the proprietary clinical study findings. Basically, if the curtains absorb the sound waves, spies cannot collect the sound bites. If I were trying to gather intelligence on your company, it would be my goal to track your data and people. But sometimes it is challenging and exciting to, as we say in the industry, physically "work the room." For example, most hotel uniforms for food and beverage personnel are generic and easily bought at a local uniform supply. I have been able to penetrate many meeting rooms with covert listening devices and pin-hole photographic equipment to "take out the trash," or plant electronic bugs inside the room while the meeting is in progress. An even better opportunity is when the participants break for lunch and leave the room dirty. If I time it right, and I usually do, I can be in and out before the regular staff knows I was even there. Even if a hotel employee or participant seems curious as to whether I belong in the area, 99.9 percent of the time the curiosity never manifests into action on their part. My presence usually goes without further investigation. Meeting planners are usually the easiest to penetrate, as they are spending the better part of their time appeasing the scientific attendees by catering to their every whim, rather than paying attention to who may be entering the room to clean up. Frequently, I run into laptops that are left on with critical data, and are easily stolen if the data seems to be a "big hit" worth the potential of being caught. As well, charts and graphs with formulas and attendee names and organizations are easily purged from the environment and go unnoticed. FOREIGN MANUFACTURING SITES ARE VULNERABLE If we haven't discussed enough means and methods, there are definitely more to address. Depending on the resources I have at my disposal, foreign manufacturing environments are great places to steal secrets. They say in Kazakhstan, you can buy a fully auto- 62 LifeScienceLeader.com September 2013 matic AK-47 rifle from a 10-year-old child for a pack of cigarettes. Fortunately for spies, the value of integrity and loyalty in most foreign environments is a commodity that is traded easily. Penetrating foreign workforces to build a pipeline of information is easier than trying to raise an American teenager in the Twitter era. While foreign manufacturing has its benefits, most secrets are stolen from sources derived from developing-country environments. There is no level of security that can be put in place that can fully stop the collection efforts by espionage professionals working within foreign territories. A creative alternative to directly stealing is to allow targets to selfimplicate through their personal integrity choices. For example, considering that most conventions are attended by professional executive types, it is quite clear that an unspoken world of illegal sex trade has probably infiltrated some of your organizational personnel, prospective employees, or vendors — the statistics simply do not lie! You may ask, "How does the sex trade affect our secrets?" Probably the oldest trick in the tradecraft book is to compromise a target through the "honey trap." The potential for enormous damage to both professional and personal life is usually enough for most targets to secretly cooperate to reveal secrets. The benefits of this typically yield a long-term "asset" (insider threat) to assist in stealing more secrets when needed. At its darkest point, espionage has led to severe cases of kidnapping, torture, and even sometimes the murder of critical participants. The FBI says, "On average, 3 percent of all U.S. domestic terrorist events involves the assassination of executives." The data is not particularly reflective of the pharmaceutical industry; however, the information does cause concern that such tragic incidents are possible — especially in such an aggressive world of economic crisis and prowess. One thing is for sure, there is absolutely no way to fully remove the possibility of theft of your corporate secrets. Utilizing the same Secret Service methodology for protecting the president of the United States of America, the goal is to "harden" the target as much as feasibly possible and become unpredictable to your adversaries — all for the goal of discouraging most from engaging in a targeted campaign of espionage-laden activities. About the Author Jonathan Snyder, CGC, CHS, is a 20-year veteran of the security and intelligence community and serves as the president and CEO of Argus International Risk Services, Inc., a global provider of security, intelligence/counter-intelligence, specialized training, and risk management solutions to the Fortune 500, federal agencies, and the Department of Defense.