Competitive counter-intelligence: the secrets of an African company

Shining ideas are sometimes the least known. This is valid in the CI community where the best receipts are often the best protected. Today, I invite you to discover an African company, whose practices of competitive counter-intelligence (not academic, not expensive,  discrete and effective) force the respect of competitors equipped with enormous monitoring budgets.

The counter-intelligence consists of tools, methods and activities of protection of which the goal is to neutralize (or divert) in a legal way any espionage or hostile CI operation. Defensive or offensive, internal or external with the organization, the counter-intelligence uses the cycle of intelligence. It can thus aim at the questions of the decision makers, the data-gathering, the analysis of these last, the protection and exploitation of the information to be produced by the organization. In our case, the trick is the raw material of the counter-intelligence strategy.

With its 83 paid, Aurora* has worked for four years on an innovating crenel, extremely interesting according to the specialists. In less than one-half ten years, the start-up pushed back three purchase offers. Its direct competitors are great multinationals, and almost everything has been tried against that company: incentive of the executives to publish in international reviews, invitations with study trips, benchmarking, elicitation, fictitious job offers, laying off, Trojan horses via Internet, robbery attempts, operations of destabilization… etc. In vain.

To face the situation, two young women of 26 and 29 years full-time animate the competitive intelligence unit (CI-U) to which is strategically attached the internal and corporate communication of the company. It is with the junior that returns the piloting of the counter-intelligence file: “both, we are at the same time the eyes, the ears, the nose, the armour and the sword of the company”, she told me before adding: “we are lucky to have a boss and colleagues who trust us completely. For nothing in the world, one can allow oneself to fail…”

In their bunker* as in other CI units, data banks constantly updated reveal details of the competition, partners or hostile NGO’s mappings, several centers of political decisions with, each time, the profilings of executives, their positions, their networks, their hobbies and the typology of the competitive intelligence strategies which result from this… On the website of the company, 1/5 of published information aims at deluding Aurora competitors (!) And when an hostile watcher insists on a detail, the CI-U discreetly post an informational missile.

In Aurora, only three “prepared” computers are connected to Internet. With a scientist mixes of true and false informations coded by easy passwords, the CI unit nourishes those who think of having perforated its safety device. In-house like outside the company, the use of e-mail, telephones and fax is extremely reduced; the remote communications are short, encrypted and buckled. Among colleagues or in the customer relation, the manager of the firm supports mordicus that those “small restrictions” increase human contacts.

In addition to the clauses of confidentiality and non-competition (traditionnaly used in this type of structure), the CI-U produced a ludic safety handbook for the employees. With each level of responsibility corresponds a storytelling, if an irrepressible desire to talk about work suddently takes an employee on an aircraft, a taxi, a conference, in love or family… Thanks to a corporate communication adapted to this strategic objective, close relations exist between paid which end up creating a police line around the informational inheritance of the company.

Since three years, this competitive counter-intelligence device has caused such nuisances to the competitors that some suspended their monitoring around Aurora. This experience feedback is for the CI experts who keep all their eggs in the basket of electronic monitoring.

Guy Gweth

*For obvious reasons, the name “Aurora” is purely fictitious here.

*The informational missiles make it possible to  inject toxic data with the  competitors in order to deteriorate their judgement or compromise them.

*The bunker here consists of safe computers never connected to Internet.