Corporate spies use social media

last updated 8 January 2015

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the latest front in corporate espionage, said Kashmir Hill in Forbes. Corporate spies are mining social-media sites for insight into companies’ projects, partners, and financials. A security firm in Bangalore, India, recently predicted a Singaporean company’s bankruptcy “based on employees’ tweets about the company’s belt-tightening” and an executive’s job-hunting post on LinkedIn. Cyberspies got a New York executive to reveal sensitive data by posing as an attractive blonde on Facebook. Not that spies even need loose lips. A company’s hiring patterns on LinkedIn are enough to give away its expansion plans. “It’s a lot easier to get good info now without doing anything dirty,” says security consultant Sean Campbell. “Whether companies like it or not, they’ve become a lot more see-through.”