Protecting Research and Technology from Espionage

Dirk Thorleuchter and Dirk Van den Poel

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: In recent years, governmental and industrial espionage becomes an increased problem for governments and corporations. Especially information about current technology development and research activities are interesting targets for espionage. Thus, we introduce a new and automated methodology that investigates the information leakage risk of projects in research and technology (R&T) processed by an organization concerning governmental or industrial espionage. Latent semantic indexing is applied together with machine based learning and prediction modeling. This identifies semantic textual patterns representing technologies and their corresponding application fields that are of high relevance for the organization’s strategy. These patterns are used to estimate organization’s costs of an information leakage for each project. Further, a web mining approach is processed to identify worldwide knowledge distribution within the relevant technologies and corresponding application fields. This information is used to estimate the probability that an information leakage occur. A risk assessment methodology calculates the information leakage risk for each project. In a case study, the information leakage risk of defense based R&T projects is investigated. This is because defense based R&T is of particularly interest by espionage agents. Overall, it can be shown that the proposed methodology is successful in calculation the espionage information leakage risk of projects. This supports an organization by processing espionage risk management.

Keywords: Latent semantic indexing; SVD; Espionage; Risk assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-ino and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_12_824.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:12/824

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().