It has been well documented, particularly by the U.S. Congress’s own investigation into intellectual property theft, that foreign intelligence services from countries such as China, Russian, Iran, North Korea, France, and Israel are a genuine threat to business travelers. Much of this theft occurs while American business travelers are operating overseas. Covert hotel intrusions (where laptops’ and smartphones’ memory can be discretely cloned), electronic intercepts and eavesdropping, and email monitoring are all common, and easily performed, techniques used by governments to collect public- and private-sector intelligence. This collection can be used for a nation’s competitive economic advantage, in terms of minimizing research and development time, bypassing patent laws, gaining an unfair advantage for cost proposals, obtaining leveraging over an opponent prior to a negotiation, as well as blackmailing employees into revealing corporate secrets.
Source : Harvard Business Review