Dirty tricks
 

  SYSCO TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION

 
  Search for “corporate intelligence” or “corporate espionage” on the Internet and you will be amazed to find how many firms there are in the business, staffed with people with backgrounds in law enforcement, intelligence services, investigative journalism or the legal profession, and providing services to Fortune 500 and other large clients.  Sysco Technology has been witness to a whole host of incidents involving personal surveillance, tracking by satellite, video and still photography, and other clandestine tactics.
 

 
  Monitoring Internet activities
The Carnivore or any other “packet sniffer” system can be installed at Internet service providers and capture "packets" of Internet traffic as they travel to and from a targeted computer. It intercepts and records all e-mail messages, lists all web servers accessed, and tracks everyone who goes to a specific webpage or FTP file.  Sysco Technology, whose regular browsing habits were known in this way, was tricked into visiting altered, bogus websites pretending to be the real thing.   The perpetrators, exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer, were also able to perform attacks.

Impersonations over the phone
People posing as legitimate representatives of banks, retailers, and credit card companies, in a variety of well-disguised formats, call to ask for information that together served as intelligence or that might betrayed confidential client details.  These calls also generated confusion and wasted a great deal of time.  Some of the named companies, in these fraudulent calls, were companies Sysco Technology actually did business with.

Computer hacking
Viruses, spam, phishing, and other hacker attacks have been targeting Sysco Technology in ever more innovative ways.  Keeping such attacks at bay  became a major, time-consuming job.  These attacks use ‘spoofed’ emails and fraudulent websites designed to fool Sysco Technology into divulging information such as usernames and passwords.  They include attemp to hijack some of Sysco Technology's domain names.

Mail interception
Not even Sysco Technology's locked mailbox is impregnable, mail having disappeared by means suspected but not provable. 


  The name speaks for itself.