Protecting Your Engineering Business from Industrial Espionage and Cybercriminals

Industrial espionage is a much more common occurrence than many people realize. As a business grows and begins to compete at a higher level, the stakes grow and their corporate secrets become more valuable. It isn’t just other businesses that might want this information, hackers who think they can sell the information will also be sniffing about.

Even if you can’t eliminate the risk entirely, there are certain things you can do to reduce the risk of a security breach in your business.

Shred Documents

While hackers do much of their work from their computers, they also often rely on a number of offline methods to enhance their effectiveness. For example, social engineering is regularly used to coerce people into unwittingly undermining otherwise very secure systems. Countering social engineering is difficult, although educating your employees about it will go a long way to mitigating the risk.

If a hacker wants to access your systems but is struggling to breach your cybersecurity, they may well turn to other methods to get through your security, including rummaging through bins for any discarded documents. If that sounds desperate to you, you might not realize just how often it works.

Make sure that any documentation that contains information that would be of interest to a would-be hacker, or corporate competitor, is completely destroyed when it is no longer needed. Make sure that if you use a shredder to do this, it is one that shreds documents securely.

Don’t Print Sensitive Information if You Don’t Have to

Of course, what would be better than having to securely destroy documents would be to not generate those documents to begin with. If you don’t have to print out sensitive information – don’t! If your sensitive documents are protected by a decent cybersecurity system, they will be about as safe as they can be. A physical document is much less secure.

Keep Your Schematics Under Wraps

Anyone who has access to the design schematics of your most important products will be able to reverse engineer them and probe them for weaknesses, even if they don’t have access to a physical device. Modern engineering businesses, like businesses in a number of other industries, make extensive use of printed circuit boards. If a competitor gets their hands on your PCB schematics, they can easily copy your proprietary technology.

Designing your own PCBs using Altium.com or a similar software package means that you can produce hardware that is unique to your engineering business. This should give you an added layer of security, as a potential hacker or criminal won’t know the internal layout and therefore won’t know what the potential entry points are. However, if they get their hands on your schematics, you instantly lose this benefit.

Keep it Need to Know

Your most sensitive corporate secrets shouldn’t be given to anyone who doesn’t need them. In any business, there will be coworkers who also become friends. Even if people only see each other when they’re at work, they will often develop friendly relationships with one another. It is important to maintain a distinction between business and pleasure – don’t feel bad about withholding sensitive information from someone that you trust if there is no reason for them to have that information.

If you want to keep your engineering business secure, you need to make sure that workers at all levels understand their individual role in ensuring the security of the business as a whole. All it takes is one clueless person to undermine even the most secure cybersecurity system.