Small Business Plays a Role in Stopping Economic Espionage

Some years ago I was one of four rotating on-air hosts and producers of a public affairs radio program in Philadelphia called Inside Government. One of my guests on the program was FBI Special Agent John Chesson.

The topic of the program was economic espionage and John Chesson was at the time the Philadelphia area coordinator of an FBI program that worked to prevent cyber economic espionage. The program was InfraGard.

In light of the recent report from the Office of National Counterintelligence Executive, called "Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace," I thought I would catch up with Special Agent John Chesson and ask him about cyber espionage and InfraGard.

John Chesson is still involved with the InfraGard program and today he is the chapter coordinator for the FBI's San Francisco office.

"InfraGard is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector," Chesson explained. "That is our way of having an ongoing relationship with the private sector."

Protecting Business Infrastructure

Chesson said that InfraGard was formed to protect the critical infrastructure of businesses from criminals, terrorists, and spies. The program was designed to educate the private sector about this these threats, and in turn the FBI could discover the concerns of the private sector.

"The goals of InfraGard are to leverage trusted partnerships and share timely actionable threat information," Chesson said. "With InfraGard, the FBI has an outlet to inform the private sector of threats we are able to see through the course of our investigations, and give them enough time to prepare themselves for those threats or to respond to those threats."

Chesson said that InfraGard offers an awareness of the latest threats and the information security specialists in their respective industries have discussions on how to prepare for or mitigate a threat.

"From our investigations, we identify a threat and say this is what the actors are doing. This is what we are seeing. This is how you can help us further identify these guys," Chesson said.

Chesson noted that there are about 45,000 InfraGard members nationally, which includes FBI agents, other government agency people and representatives from both large and small businesses firms.

Small Business Involvement Grows

"There is a fairly significant representation of small businesses," Chesson said. "I would say that in the San Francisco chapter, almost half of the members are representing small and medium size businesses."

Chesson explained that the large companies are facing challenges, even with their large IT and security budgets. But because the big firms have the analysis resources, they can identify best practices. A small business can learn about these best practices by being an InfraGard chapter member.

"Some of the benefits for a small business are these larger businesses coming in and presenting the issues and problems they've dealt with, and how they dealt with them," Chesson said. "Small businesses can take these little nuggets of information and apply them to make their business a little bit safer."

Call your local FBI office if you would like to become an InfraGard member.

More on the InfraGard program in my next post.