"Stealing products is a lot easier than doing research", said Rene Pfeiffer, organiser of the third international in-depth security conference in Austria.

"Industrial espionage is getting a bigger problem", he said, adding that most enterprises and organisations make a grave mistake when facing a crisis.

"A lot of them turn their attention to saving resources and money, but this is the moment hackers with bad intentions are waiting for", he said.

One of the conference streams will be addressed by David Burgess, a mobile phone security expert responsible for co-founding the openBTS (open base station) project designed to encourage rural usage of mobile networks.

Burgess managed to create his own GSM network at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. The technology seen on the site enables hackers to capture mobile phones - and their allied wireless identities - onto their own networks if deployed correctly, he said.

Another presentation exploits wireless data interception.

Hosted by by Thorsten Schroeder - who co-developed technology early last year to crack Microsoft's wireless keyboard encryption - the presentation will see the unveiling of Keykeriki, a utility that can intercept the keys pressed on a wireless keyboard.