Eavesdropping

Listening to someone else's conversation. In its most basic form, it amounts to one person keeping within earshot of a conversation between two other persons, but in the security and IT worlds it extends to remote listening and recording devices, include the interception of telephone calls, fax transmissions, e-mails, data transmissions, data-scoping, and even radio scanning for mobile communications.

The security implications for companies are primarily that user identification details or passwords can become known to criminally inclined individuals, or that confidential/sensitive information about the organisation, its finances, or activity plans may leak to competitors.