This is so obvious that cold war is not over, it has simply moved into the global marketplace that this arena brings a new generation of  cyber crimes. One of these crimes is ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE that is so common in cyberspace.
Economic espionage is defined as the theft or misappropriation of trade secrets[1].
 Economic Espionage is a cyber crime against your company that you can’t afford to ignore and one the largest business crisis in the today cyber world is economic espionage.


The FBI  estimates that every year billions of U.S. dollars are lost to foreign competitors who deliberately target economic intelligence in flourishing U.S. industries and technologies, and who cull intelligence out of  shelved technologies by exploiting open source and classified information known as trade secrets.  Foreign competitors who criminally seek economic intelligence generally operate in three ways to create their spy networks:




  1. They aggressively target and recruit susceptible people (often from the same national background) working for U.S. companies and research institutions;

   2. They recruit people to locate economic intelligence through operations like bribery, discreet  theft, dumpster diving (in search of discarded trade secrets), and wiretapping; and,

   3. They establish seemingly innocent business relationships between foreign companies and U.S.industries to gather economic intelligence including classified information.
    In an effort to safeguard our nation's economic secrets, the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) was signed into law on October 11, 1996[2].
References: 


1-Accounting web.(04/08/2009).official site of accounting web.Retrieved April 20,2010 
2-
Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI).official site of the U.S. Federal Government.
Retrieved April 20,2010 from  http://www.fbi.gov/hq/ci/economic.htm