Over $950 Million In Illegal Eavesdropping Equipment Sold Annually – $500 Million Of It Targets Corporations
By Paul Turner, TSD TSS,
Professional Development TSCM Group Inc.
The threat is real. The threat is verifiable. The threat goes un-checked for the vast number of Canadian businesses, corporations, financial institutions, industrial manufacturing facilities, and other highly competitive business environments that fail to implement a formal Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) and Counter-Intelligence (CI) due diligence Technical Security (TS) program.
Consider the following:
- Over $950 million in illegal eavesdropping equipment is sold each year in North America.
- More than $500 million of it is targeted towards corporations annually.
- The average loss per incident of economic espionage is $1.3 million.
- Damage inflicted by economic espionage is reported to be in excess of $24 billion annually.
It matters little whether an interception device is a simplistic low cost design or a sophisticated high cost device; the result is the same.
The availability of interception devices and the willingness to utilize such technology is a serious threat in every Canadian business environment. The Technical Security Branch (TSB) is finding compromises (electronic and non-electronic) at an alarming rate. The vast majority of business owners and management rarely implement a formal TSCM program and only conduct sweeps in response to a specific issue or concern. By this time it is often too late and the damage is already done.
A formal Technical Surveillance Countermeasures program is essential to the proper detection and identification of Technical Security vulnerabilities that are inherent in every business environment regardless of size, industry or sector. The relatively small cost in implementing a formal due diligent TSCM program far out weighs the losses caused by a single incident that typically results in direct business losses in the 100’s of thousands of dollars per incident on average.
Although the precise requirements will be different for each and every business environment, the average annual cost to maintain a formal TSCM / CI program ranges from $5,000 to $10,000 dollars. Remember that the losses previously described are based on just one incident of compromise. The reality is that most compromises are ongoing, will affect the company involved over a long period of time and can have a devastating effect on company viability.
Visit www.pdtg.ca for further information on TSB and Technical Surveillance Countermeasures.
