Almost 500,000 businesses in the UK could be victims of industrial espionage and many won’t ever realise until it’s too late.

Bugging, electronic surveillance, social engineering, computer hacking and old fashioned bribery are all on the rise as companies look for ways to gain advantage over competitors in a tight economy.

“We’ve heard of all sorts going on recently including people being planted in rival organisations which makes the checking of references especially important.” said Andy Hamilton-James, Director of the National Security College, the UK’s leading specialists government licensed security training centre.

“A lot of organisations are waking up to the fact that they have a lot of sensitive information and no real protection around it. Although security costs money, it cost an awful lot more if there’s a lack of it.”

A couple of years ago bugging devices were found in only around 4 per cent of offices swept by security experts now that number is at least 10 per cent and growing.

“It’s not just the big boys who are at risk of workplace spies,” said Gordon Mowat of Aspire Management Services.

“Even small firms have valuable information such as customer lists, pricing structures and business plans that a rival could find very valuable.

“Recently a dairy firm in England had to pay out more than £200,000 after it was convicted of bribing an employee of a rival company to hand over the names and details of customers so they could undercut prices.”

A recent survey of office staff in London, New York and Amsterdam by Cyber-Ark, the global information security software company, found that 56 per cent of workers were so worried about losing their jobs that they admitted to downloading competitive corporate data which they thought might help them get a new position with a rival organisation.

Top of the list of confidential information was client and contact databases, project plans and product information.