EVE General Discussion

Same vein as my other post but with a different focus.

How, mainly as a small corp, do you weed out spys?

Get people who are fresh and obviously brand new or get people with a history and ask people linked to that history about them.

I'm going to quote Florestan Bronstein''s post from your other thread directly, as it summarises some very useful procedures to follow in order to minimise the risk of recruiting a spy. Note, it's minimise, you will never really prevent it 100%

Florestan Bronstein wrote :

"aside from API:

forum search - special attention to character bazaar and Timecode Bazaar.
checking employment history - maybe there are some alt corps in there? evewho is great for this sort of thing
checking contracts history - not complete but it might give you some pointers
checking killboards - who did he fly with? who did he kill?

If you have your own spies inside entities that you suspect to spy on you you can also do interesting stuff like

* watermarking important forum posts/announcements to trace leaks (look for the PL forum mirror it has some nice info on this: idea is that you display different versions of the same post to each viewer, e.g. by automatically replacing some characters with equally looking but different unicode characters based on the viewer's forum userid; or by offering different combinations of synonyms - e.g. four words with one possible synonym for each gives you 16 different versions of the forum post which already cuts down the number of people you suspect of having leaked the post considerably)

* harvesting IPs, e.g. post a link to some funny image hosted on a server you have access to on your enemies' forum, log IPs & timestamps which access that image, try to connect them to characters that replied to your post, compare to your own people's IPs that you harvested through your TeamSpeak server.
(or have your spy post a link to your file during some roam, that way you know pretty well who has clicked it, try to correlate IPs with characters by e.g. using the country information displayed by TeamSpeak; If there is only one German in the roam the German IP is probably him).
Also use voicecomms logs to look for people who listen in on ops but don't participate (or people who only log in for pvp ops). Check IPs that access your own forums or voicecomms for obvious proxies/VPN providers.

* make note of idiosyncratic misspellings or grammar fails

* keep a close eye on people who are too eager to x up or never x up when you call for all spais to 'x' up in fleet chat.
j/k "

--end Quote.

Very useful advice on how to get your spy filters tuned.

With credit to Florestan. Well said, Sir.

o/

thanks for the quote, I had not seen this thread when I wrote the post.

As I wrote in the other thread, the PL forum mirror taken last year (e.g. http://jdel.eu/pandemic/forums/forum-123-.html) is a very interesting source of information & brainstorming on spying and spy detection.

I just want to emphasize one thing: don't allow yourself to get crazy about spies.

It's fine to put prevention and detection methods into place that would put most RL corporations (who actually have valuable IP to protect) at shame, but you should try to keep these things out of the limelight and really limit the number of people coming into contact with it.

Paranoia of spies is way more destructive to the motivation and cohesion of any corporation than whatever information the spies are passing on.

Openly ridicule any person that is speculating about other corp members being spies (and check into the claims silently), don't allow paranoia and denunciation to spread.

Don't tell your fleet "we just lost because they had intel on every single move of us" even if it is true (and make a few "spies, please x up" jokes when it is too obvious to ignore).

If you are a larger corporation it is almost impossible to get rid off low-level spies. Booting them doesn't help a lot, as they'll just keep coming back with other characters/accounts.

A spy that you have known about for a long time is a spy that you might be able to feed wrong info at the one time it actually matters. A spy that you kicked has already been replaced with a spy that you don't know about.

Consider making (internal) information that you expect to be leaked by spies public in the first place, it ridicules spies and removes the psychological impact of your own guys being aware that they are being spied upon. Look at the way GSF cross-posts their Alliance News to kugu for an example of this policy.

Spies with director access or as FCs are a different matter and should be taken very seriously - but in these positions burnout and frustration making your own people switch sides is far more likely than planned infiltration.

Try to get spies engaged in your community, have them make friends in your corporation, try to offer them fun ops and make them spend much more time with your guys than with their "real" home.
Think of the parable about the teacher who knows that one of his students will become a great leader but doesn't know which one. If you can run your corp in a way that would make a spy want to change sides, your regular members will profit, too. It's the only way to win the spy game.