This is a literature review article. The purpose of this article is to explain and provide a deeperunderstanding of economic and industrial espionage. Furthermore, it describes legal andillegal methods of espionage and highlights the different aspects of preventing espionage suchas; technical, operational, physical and personnel security. A number of theoretical conceptshave been extracted and analyzed from different scientific articles which have beensummarized and anticipated in the form of theoretical framework. Incredible results are oftenproduced by exploiting industrial espionage. By concentrating on complete security, and notsimply specialized security, data security experts can altogether hamper enemy endeavors totake their association's data resources.