The dust has settled, the ink on the deal has dried, and one of the biggest sideshows in Silicon Valley this year appears to be over. The litigation between eBay, the buyers of Skype and its original founders has been dropped, and the deal, which values Skype at $2.7 billion, should close sometime soon.

Which means it’s time to start reflecting on the lessons of the whole skirmish. Here are three initial thoughts. (You’ll need an understanding of the primary characters and dynamics, so check our previous stories.) Please add your own thoughts on lessons learned in the comments.

1. When you buy a company, buy all of the underlying technology.

Lots of folks are flatly condemning Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief executive (and current California gubernatorial candidate), for failing to buy a key piece of Skype’s infrastructure back in 2005. The founders kept ownership of the so-called Global Index, a peer-to-peer system that was at the center of their lawsuits against eBay this year. Back in 2005, eBay was bidding for Skype primarily against Google, with Yahoo and News Corp. in the wings. Purchasing the Global Index would have greatly complicated the purchase for eBay; it had other shareholders, and the Skype founders were already thinking about their next video venture, Joost, which would also use the technology.

It appears Ms. Whitman simply trusted the Skype founders to continue to make the Global Index available to Skype. That left eBay vulnerable.

2. Litigation can create valuable leverage in deals, even if its merits are questionable.

We will never know whether the Skype founders would have won their lawsuits, and it is doubtful they could have halted the sale of Skype. EBay was prepared to claim that it was Niklas Zennstrom, one of Skype’s founders, who inextricably linked the Skype code and the Global Index while he worked for eBay. It is also not clear whether Michelangelo Volpi, the Index Ventures partner whose allegiances were at the heart of the lawsuits, really had any fiduciary obligations to Joost by early 2009, when the online video firm had so clearly failed. His employment contract was actually governed by New York state law, which gives employees plenty of leeway to seek new employment.

Nevertheless, the lawsuits aired embarrassing details and put pressure on the dealmakers and on eBay, which needed to show the stock market it could close the sale as promised.

“One hates to see the kind of litigiousness the founders practiced here rewarded so handsomely,” said Kirk O. Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “Unfortunately, the time value of new technologies creates an opportunity for harassment and bullying simply by creating delay.”

3. Silicon Valley is a small place. Watch out for conflicts of interest (and claims of conflicts).

The Web of relationships in the Skype saga is dense. Danny Rimer was the underwriting analyst for Netscape, where Marc Andreesssen began his career. Mr. Volpi and Charles Giancarlo, a partner and key figure in the deal at Silver Lake, worked together at Cisco. And Mr. Volpi was a board member of the old Skype before he became chief executive and chairman of Joost, and then the chief architect of the buyout of Skype. All this created a thicket of overlapping fiduciary responsibilities, which the Skype founders exploited in their lawsuits.

“Silicon Valley deals have always been messy, and this is one more episode that demonstrates that,” Mr. Hanson said.

Brad Stone

Posted in Economic warfare, Infowar Tagged: ebay, Google, News Corp, Silicon Valley, Skype, Yahoo ]]> http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/lessons-from-the-war-over-skype/feed/ 0 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/finjan-warns-cie-as-china-prepares-for-cyber-espionage/ http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/finjan-warns-cie-as-china-prepares-for-cyber-espionage/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:15:30 +0000 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/?p=329 ]]>

A report commissioned by a US Congressional advisory panel monitoring the security implications of trading with China has warned that China has started spying on the US government and major companies.

And, says Finjan, the business Internet security specialist, now is the time for companies to start beefing up their IT security defences to stop them falling victim to what appears to be a rash of impending cyber-espionage from the Far East.

” Many cyber attacks and hacker incursions originated from China have been implicated in into Western IT systems in recent years. Obviously it’s hard to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the government there is involved in these attacks, however according to the report it’s quite likely that government is active in this domain,” said Yuval-Ben Itzhak, Finjan’s chief technology officer.

“It’s against this backdrop that we’ve been conducting investigations into Chinese attacks on Western public and private-sector IT systems for some time,” he added.

According to the Finjan CTO, his company’s malicious code research centre (MCRC) conducted in in-depth study into the rising volume of attacks emanating from China and reported that there were some very sophisticated attacks taking place.

In the study, he explained, Finjan’s research team found at least one set of attacks coming from a server group that belongs to a Chinese government office.

Researchers, he said, discovered that some sites in the network lead to Trojan sites that exploit the users’ Web browser software by downloading the Trojan and installing it on the user desktop.

Once the users’ PC has been infected, he went on to say, the Trojan then starts to send data to other Web sites on the Internet-connected network.

Additional sites in the network, meanwhile, were found to monitor and control the attack using statistics as to how many users visit the site and how many got infected.

“And that was two years ago, so you can imagine that the Chinese hacker attack groups – regardless of who they are affiliated to – have increased in their level of technology sophistication, so this report serves as a clear warning to companies of the need to review and enhance their IT security defences,” he said.

“Tools and products to fights against the increasing cybercrime from China are available for US Businesses and individuals. The reason many businesses are becoming victims to these attacks is the lack of knowledge and the false believe that their existing Firewalls and Anti-virus can do the job for them. Although that was the case 10-5 years ago, since cyber criminals introduced new attack techniques Firewall and Anti-virus are not enough to stop today’s cyber attacks.”

Finjan

Thanks to the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it’s a given that malicious hackers will devise ways to exploit the sites’ numerous users in order to infect their computers with malware. This unwanted software is designed to do a number of terrible things ranging from identity theft to turning computer into remote-controllable “zombie” machines.

Without sufficient anti-virus and malware protection programs installed, social networking users can easily become victims to these ever-evolving attacks. However, the best way to avoid becoming a victim yourself is to be aware of what’s out there and what sorts of things you should avoid. Below are the best practices which you should use on Facebook and Twitter in order to keep yourself safe.

The Problem with Malicious Links

One of the most common vectors for attacks are malicious links posted either to Twitter or to your Facebook wall. In the past, such as with the malware known as Kooface, the troublesome links could be easily identified because they would often use a consistent phrase followed by a URL. For example, in August, Koobface was posting links that read “my home video : ) ” which was followed by a URL and then a random component on the end such as “HA-HA-HA!!”, “W.O.W.”, “WOW”, “L.O.L.”, “LOL”, “;)” or “OMFG!!!”

Although the end piece changed from tweet to tweet, the message itself remained the same. However, security researcher Costin Raiu of Kaspersky Lab tells us that easy-to-identify messages are not as common anymore. Today, it’s much harder to identify malicious links thanks to two newer techniques being used by hackers. Below those two newer methods are described in more detail as is the tried-and-true method of spreading malware via email.

Method 1: Hijacking Twitter’s Trending Topics

The first technique, which really became popular in August of this year, involves hackers creating Twitter new accounts and then posting messages related to whatever trending, or “hot,” topic was being heavily discussed on Twitter at that time. This would allow the post to be aggregated in Twitter search results where unsuspecting users would click on the included link. The text accompanying the link would be intriguing to those interested in the subject, enticing them to click through.

Method 2: Hijacking Legitimate Accounts

The second technique involves infiltrating legitimate accounts through phishing attempts and other methods so that the hacker essentially has control over a “real” account. After control has been established, if on Twitter, the hacker will then tweet out links that redirect users to malware-infected sites. Because the tweets come from an account that already has an established set of followers, those reading the tweets assume it’s safe and don’t hesitate to click the links.

After infecting the account of a Facebook user, malware often uses that particular person’s account to spread, too. As with the malicious links on Twitter, because it appears that the links posted are from a trusted friend, other users don’t realize that the posted link is harmful.

On Facebook, one of the most problematic malware programs is Koobface, a particular type of malicious software that sees 20 to 30 new variations per day. Despite the number of variants out there, Koobface’s M.O. is relatively consistent: it tricks people into clicking links. These links appear on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but also on MySpace, hi5, Bebo, Friendster, and others.

Method 3: Dangerous Email

A third method to encourage social networking users to click on infected links is the old but still effective technique of sending out spoofed email. Hackers can create email messages that appear to be sent from a social networking site. The messages prompt you to “update your account” or open an attachment containing your new password among other things.

Although many users are now wary of email, these techniques are still being seen in the wild, so it’s clear that to some extent they still work.

How To Stay Safe

There are a number of best practices that you should follow in order to stay safe and avoid infection. They are as follows:

1. Don’t assume a link is “safe” because it’s from a friend: As noted above, your friend’s account may be infected. You should never assume that a link is safe just because a friend tweeted it or posted it to your wall. Use your common sense. If it doesn’t sound like something they would say, be wary, don’t click. If you’re unsure, try to contact them through another channel and see if the link is legit.

2. Don’t assume Twitter links are safe because Twitter is now scanning for malware: In August, Twitter partnered with Google to use Google’s Safe Browsing API, a technology that checks URLs against Google’s blacklist. This prevents spammers from posting malicious URLs to Twitter, but it does NOT prevent them from posting shortened URLs which direct users to those same malicious sites. It’s better than no protection at all, but it’s not going to keep you entirely safe.

3. Don’t Assume Bit.ly Links are Safe: Earlier this year, Twitter’s default URL-shortening service Bit.ly, began warning users of malware. Bit.ly also uses Google’s Safe Browsing API along with two other blacklists to identify malicious links. Although the service doesn’t prevent users from posting these links, it will warn upon clicking that the site being linked to is infected. However, as Raiu tells us, this is not 100% effective either. Kaspersky has identified a number of malicious links which Bit.ly did not block. However, you can assume that Bit.ly is generally safer than the other URL-shortening services because it uses this technology and because the hackers are generally avoiding this service at the moment because of its built-in protection. But it is not completely safe – nothing ever is.

4. Use an up-to-date web browser: Kaspersky recommends using the latest version of your web browser and keeping it up-to-date with the necessary patches. That means Internet Explorer users should be on IE8 – and since this browser is attacked the most, it’s critical that you make sure it stays updated as needed. Firefox is the second most attacked browser, but fortunately, it has a self-updating feature built in. Google Chrome is also good because it has a self-updating feature as well as another security feature that runs plugins in “sandboxes,” or restricted environments. If an attacker was able to exploit the browser and run malicious code, it would be isolated to this sandbox and would not able to effect the entire machine. Opera and Safari are also good browsers and should be kept current, too.

5. Keep Windows up-to-date: As always, Windows users should make sure their systems are current with the latest patches from Microsoft. Automatic updates should be turned on.

6.   Keep Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash up-to-date: At the moment, Adobe Reader and Flash are the two most targeted programs by hackers. A lot of malware specifically goes after known vulnerabilities within Adobe’s software. In addition, a common method of attack, such as that used by Koobface, is to redirect a victim to a malware-infested site where the user is prompted to update their Flash player or Adobe Reader in order to see the website content. NEVER do this. Always go to Adobe’s site on your own to download the latest version or update the software on your computer using its own built-in update mechanisms.

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6.  Don’t assume you’re safe because you use a Mac: While it’s true that Mac users are less targeted than Windows users, they are not immune to malware, despite what those commercials may say. Although Apple did include some malware protection in their latest operating system, it only protects users from two trojans; you cannot count on it alone to protect you. There are a couple of hundred of trojans currently in the wild that specifically target Mac machines, according to Kaspersky. In fact, there may even be as many as a thousand, but researchers are unable to identify all of them because Mac users don’t typically run anti-virus software which is how much of the data is collected. These days, when a user clicks an infected link, the malicious web page will now sometimes identify whether that user is coming from a Windows or Mac machine and then display the appropriate version of the trojan accordingly. A particular family of trojans known as “DNS Changer” trojans are the most common ones used to attack Mac machines. The only way to really be sure that you’re protected against these malicious programs is to run anti-malware software on your Mac, but most Mac users won’t do so, preferring to take their chances since their risk is lower.

7.  Be wary of email messages from social networks: Because email addresses can be “spoofed” by hackers, you can’t assume that an email from Facebook or Twitter is really from those the site it claims to be from. As always, you should never open attachments you were not expecting to receive and you should be wary of clicking on links – especially if you’re being told to “update your account.” If you do click on a link and are taken to a web page that asks you to log into the site, DON’T DO IT. It would be handing over your password to the hackers. Instead, you should always access the sites directly by typing in their URL in your browser or clicking a saved link in your Favorites.

8. It’s Not Just a Matter of Common Sense Anymore

As the above best practices show, a lot of the things you can do to protect yourself from malware are the same as they have been in the past – keep your computer and browser up-to-date, don’t open attachments, etc. However, malware is trickier to identify these days thanks to social networking sites. It now uses the trusted identities of your friends in order to lull its victims into a false sense of safety. You can no longer simply assume that because someone you know posted a link, it’s automatically safe. You can’t even assume that the networks themselves are safe, either. They’re not always scanned for malware-laden links, and when they are, such as is the case with Twitter, it’s not a 100% effective method.

Security researchers are actively working on better ways to fight this problem – for example, Kaspersky just announced their “Krab Krawler” project which will help keep their blacklists current by scanning for malicious links on Twitter, but it’s not a tool that end-users can download to protect themselves; it’s only one of many methods that security firms use to collect data about the malware on the internet. The best way to stay safe is to follow through with all the best practices – not just one or two. Malware isn’t ever going away, so everyone must do their own part in order to stay safe on the web.

By  Sarah Perez of Read Write Web, published in The New York Times.

Security is the top IT priority for small and medium-sized businesses. Really? That somewhat surprising finding comes from a survey issued today by SWC Technology Partners, an IT services provider that focuses on smaller companies.

According to SWC, which is based in Oak Brook, Ill., 55 percent of the 170 IT decision-makers surveyed called security projects a high priority, good for first place. Business intelligence, which has taken the top spot in many such surveys over the past couple of years, ranked second, with 38 percent calling it highly important. Storage, web development and LAN/WAN infrastructure followed.

Security is often one of the areas hardest hit by contracting budgets, since it can be difficult to demonstrate return on investment. Observers and analysts have been fretting that the current recession would end up having some nasty effects on corporate IT security, particularly at smaller companies.

SWC’s results say otherwise. Of course, this is one isolated survey, which SWC conducted itself rather than using an independent research firm. Still, the participating IT leaders, which include both SWC customers and general contacts, hail from a cross-section of industries manufacturing, retail, education, construction, healthcare, accounting and non-profits. And while the mid-market companies represented were mainly in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, Elliott Baretz, director of business development, said that the numbers likely play out nationally to some degree.

Baretz told me that he was also surprised that security ranked so highly. “I’m with customers every day, and most of my conversations are not about security,” he said. Unless the client has a specific security issue or a compliance concern, the subject doesn’t often come up.

There are a couple of ways to look at the finding, according to Baretz. One is that when you present people with a list of areas to rank, they might consider it irresponsible not to call security a high priority. “Does it mean that’s where I spend my next dollar? Probably not,” he said.

On the other hand, the survey could be viewed as coming at the end of the recession, and IT leaders who have had to put security on the back burner are now feeling vulnerable. Where companies have been cutting back on IT security investments, said Baretz, they might now realize that they have to bump up spending to stay safe.

What about areas where it’s easier to justify investment? Of the respondents, 41 percent named virtualization as technology with high ROI justification. “Virtualization has become a widely adopted and accepted platform to consolidate and manage server infrastructure, thereby reducing costs associated with hardware acquisition and management as well as reducing the physical footprint of the server room itself,” said SWC in a statement. Collaboration tools and Web development ranked second and third, respectively, in terms of cost justification.

Looking ahead, 51 percent of the IT leaders said they are “cautiously optimistic” about their business outlook over the next year. Eight percent said they are pessimistic and another 3 percent said they are highly pessimistic.

SWC, which has partnerships with Microsoft, Cisco, HP and Symantec, had $15 million in revenues last year. More than half of the IT decision-makers the company surveyed manage environments with between 100 and 2,000 users.

CIOZONE

Since October 22, 2009, Les Afriques, the French-writing newspaper of African finance, publishes a weekly chronicle in competitive intelligence (CI) under the feather of Guy Gweth, executive director of GwethMarshall Consulting. After France 24, it is the first time that a great international medium deals with the subject in a continuous way. A good news for the companies and the CI community.

Les Afriques is the first Panafrican financial newspaper. It appears every Thursday. While betting on the competitive intelligence, the weekly magazine meets the needs for the African and international companies, and thus, takes part in the sensitizing of the decision makers.

Until now, France 24 was the only Francophone international medium to devote a program to competitive intelligence, a semi-monthly program animated by Ali Laïdi.

Les Afriques is consultable online. The whole of the publications is available in pdf and the titles are free access. In May 2009, the newspaper’s website counted 6500 subscribers with the daily newsletter, 135.000 distinct visitors and a total of 1.8 million posted pages.

The paper version of Les Afriques is currently available in west and central Africa, in Algeria, in Belgium, in Canada, in France, in Italy, in Luxembourg, in Morocco, in Switzerland and Tunisia.

The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, by John Freeman. Very interesting!

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” he writes that “one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” And the problem is? In this case I asked a question and got helpful responses. Freeman says what I should have done is “pick up the phone.” Really? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

I am far from the proverbial power user (the “average corporate worker,” Freeman tells us, in a characteristically unsourced factoid, gets about 200 e-mail messages a day). But I have felt e-mail’s tyranny, and Freeman has some good innings on this subject. It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans, Freeman read somewhere, write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers. It begets large-scale disinhibition, in the form of flaming and the sharing of too much information. It is hugely prone to being mis­interpreted, and when correspondents have a difference of opinion, it usually makes matters worse. It creates a lot of busywork. It is responsible for the emoticon.

Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. In the earlier pages, he provides a short history of pre-Internet communication, from the tablet to the telegraph, and reveals that with the arrival of each new technology, people said pretty much the same thing as he is fixing to say about e-mail. A woman at the turn of the 20th century blamed the postcard craze for the fact that “there is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing, as there used to be in our time. It is a sort of go as you please development, and the result is atrocious.” An editorial in an English newspaper in 1901, referring to the telegraph, lamented: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. We have minimized and condensed our emotions. . . . We have destroyed the memory of yesterday with the worries of tomorrow. . . . We do not feel and enjoy; we assimilate and appropriate.” Remove the quotation marks, and the lines would fit perfectly into Freeman’s argument.

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.”While the diagnosis feels overblown, the prescription generally makes excellent sense. Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” A big 10-4 on that one.

Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Characteristically, he gives lip service to the medium’s convenience but says nothing about its capacity for creativity and expression. “Each correspondent we have, and each interaction with that correspondent, demands a slightly different register,” he correctly writes, and then complains that the requirement is “exhausting.” But in truth it has meant good things for the cause of writing. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register.

E-mail in particular and online writing in general have their well-known flaws and limitations, but they have also served as cleansing agents for prose, much as journalistic writing did early in the 20th century. That is, while they may disinhibit inappropriate declarations, they also inhibit dull, abstract wordiness.

Early in his book, Freeman writes, “No one can predict the future of a technology, and this book is certainly not going to try, but it is essential, especially when that technology has become as prevalent and pervasive as e-mail, to examine its effects and assumptions and make an attempt to understand it in a broader context.”

Maybe the best thing I can say about ­e-mail is that I can’t imagine anyone using it to compose such a sentence.

Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of the forthcoming “Memoir: A History.” He blogs at campuscomments.wordpress.com.

From The New York Times

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Communication, E-mail, Information Management, Social Network ]]> http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/the-tyranny-of-e-mail/feed/ 1 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/ngo%e2%80%99s-and-competitive-intelligence-by-guy-gweth/ http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/ngo%e2%80%99s-and-competitive-intelligence-by-guy-gweth/#comments Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:15:50 +0000 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/?p=285 ]]>

I have recently published an article about Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and competitive intelligence in Bonaberi.com.

I have discovered that many people, even CI profesionals, were interested to know how to include an NGOs (like Amnesty International or Greenpeace…) in the CI strategy of a company (like Chevron or Exxon Mobile…)

Other people were extremely surprised of reading that several international NGOs have business models (like companies!) and use competitive intelligence in their management, fundraising or information warfare…

I hope to have the opportunity of sharing those experiences next time in the CI Magazine of SCIP. While waiting, you can read some notes here in my French blog.

Guy Gweth

An Informatica White Paper – From Intellibriefs

Basel II is one of the major drivers of change within the banking world. Because it is used to assess risk, the underlying quality of the data is critical in delivering a report with any level of confidence. Financial institutions are adopting Basel II not simply because it is a compliance directive but also because it is, for many, the embodiment of best practice.

While almost all leading banks have invested in the data infrastructure to support Basel II, data quality is still often managed as an explicit function, dealt with by tools not designed specifically for the purpose.

This white paper examines this important oversight, discusses the critical role of data quality for Basel II compliance and introduces Informatica’s Basel II solution.

Register today.

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.

Posted in Competitive intelligence, Economic espionage, Economic intelligence in Africa, Infowar, misinformation, Security Tagged: Competitive intelligence, Counter-intelligence, Strategy ]]> http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/competitive-counter-intelligence-the-secrets-of-an-african-company/feed/ 2 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/when-the-wind-of-the-competitive-intelligence-blows-in-africa/ http://comintelca.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/when-the-wind-of-the-competitive-intelligence-blows-in-africa/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:25:07 +0000 Admin. http://comintelca.wordpress.com/?p=214 ]]>

Seminar of economic intelligence for the senior officials of public administration on November 27 in Dakar, conference on “the economic intelligence and technological survey…” on November 19 in Libreville, international meeting on “Competitiveness and accumulation of competences in universalization…” on November 13-14 in Rabat, 2^nd sittings of economic intelligence on November 10 in Algiers… The wind of competitive intelligence (CI) wich blew in Africa this 11^th month of the year deserves our attention.

From Libreville to Dakar

In Gabon, Prosper Tonda Mabenda of the Group of studies and research on communication (GERC*) attached to the Institute of research in social sciences (IRSH*) of the university Omar Bongo (UOB*) harnessed itself to decipher the stakes and to sensitize the public and private actors with the virtues of the competitive intelligence for Gabon. Tonda Mabenda militates for the creation of a “national pole of economic intelligence around the vital sectors, and in which the university and research will play an eminently strategic part”.

In Senegal, the seminar organized by the Center of diplomatic and strategic studies (CEDS*) and the stations and telecommunications regulation Agency (ARTP*) has been presented by the authorities as the starting point of a public policy of competitive intelligence to Senegal. This meeting profited from the expertise of the School of economic warfare of Paris (EGE*). An executive training with a high diploma specialized in economic and strategic intelligence should see the day as of January 2009 within the CEDS of Dakar.

From Rabat to Algiers

In Morocco, the participants of the international meeting organized under the patronage of Its Majesty King Mohammed VI insisted on the necessary partnership of private education and public sectors to face the challenges of globalization. They pled for the State assistance to the creation of perennial CI devices within the territorial collectivities and the companies. Very soon, a high level CI training should start in Morocco on the model of the specialized cycle of the school economic warfare of Paris.

In Algeria, the matter was the beginning of the CI practices implementation for 2009. Organized by the VIP Group, the 2^nd CI sitting attracted public and private administrations’ executives. After the adoption of a bill against the cybercriminality by the Council of Ministers, Algiers awaits from now on the nomination of a CI director to the ministry of industry. This awakening on the role of the competitive intelligence in Africa is remarkable. However, it calls some warning statements.

Africans together

There is no competitive intelligence without strategy. The will of our States to build national CI devices is a long-life engagement. But the hyperpolitisation of the decision-making centres is a brake. In the absence of independent experts who are able to think the strategy of the State on 15-25 years, it will always miss the dynamic cohesion that gives results in the duration. Moreover, having an official CI device is a matter of economic sovereignty and patriotism. The place left by the African CI actors on the ground of the knowledge production is now occupied by competitors, but it would be regrettable to be unaware of their potential. In addition, our relationships with certain countries should not influence our choices. Japan, China or the United States have more powerful CI devices closer to our cultural matrices.

If by misfortune, some barrier was to prevent us from reaching the best practices, the African competitive intelligence would only be the continuation of our errors by other means.

Guy Gweth

*The initials are all in French.

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