FOR espionage of the cloak-and-dagger variety, it is hard to beat the pages of John le Carré or Ian Fleming. But the world of corporate spying has plenty of drama of its own. Take the alleged skulduggery in a recent court case involving two American software firms. In May a jury awarded Appian, whose headquarters are in McLean, Virginia, a whopping US$2bn in damages after it had accused Massachusetts-based Pegasystems of illegally snooping on it to gain a competitive edge. The trial revealed that Pegasystems executives had referred to a contractor hired to obtain some of the ingredients of Appian’s secret sauce as “our spy” in internal documents, and had dubbed the overall spying effort “Project Crush”. Pegasystems, whose stock plummeted after the ruling, and which is set to face a barrage of class-action suits from disgruntled investors, has vowed to appeal against the “unjust” decision.

The episode illustrates how interest in business espionage, and learning how to foil it, has broadened. Snooping is no longer mostly centred on a few “sensitive” industries that have long been vulnerable, such as defence and pharmaceuticals. It is increasingly used to target smaller companies in surprising sectors, including education and agriculture. It has, in short, become more of a general business risk. Just as the Cold War may have been the heyday of great-power spookery, at least in the popular imagination, corporate espionage may now be entering its golden age.

There are two, closely intertwined reasons for this. The first is the inexorable growth of the intangible economy; intellectual property (IP) is increasingly the currency of business. The second is the growing sophistication of online hackers. CEOs should be worried when they see their firms’ secrets being hawked on the dark web: one new marketplace, Industrial Spy, flogs stolen data and documents to “legitimate” businesses. Information is sold in packets ranging from a few dollars to millions. Keeping IP safely locked in the digital vault can be devilishly difficult.