1996 saw the first ever conviction for economic espionage after an employee stockpiled company secrets and offered to sell them to a competitor. The FBI was tipped off and set up a sting. There are four basic lines of defence that businesses can draw up to protect themselves from security breaches. One of the most popular security devices is the firewall, which controls the flow of data between networks, helping to prevent unauthorised access. Second is 'intrusion detection' - a user pattern recognition system that looks for anomalies such as increased activity on a server at night, then triggers an alert.
Encryption means users can scramble data, keeping information private even if it is accessed.
At the most basic level is authentication, which controls access to information via secure identity smart cards, pin numbers, fingerprints, signatures and other digital certificates. But none of these methods is without flaws. While firewalls, installed between an internal network and a Web server, can restrict traffic between networks, they do not police traffic on internal networks. Nor do they control internal network traffic, warn of internal abuse, or encrypt data. And a firewall will not be effective at all unless it is configured and maintained correctly.