KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Cheap debugging equipment and amateur detection skills will not guarantee the protection of your privacy or security of your information from industrial espionage.

"I doubt very much that a man in a hotel room with a woman is going to have his mind on debugging to even do the job properly," said counter-espionage expert Akhbar Satar.

"It's always best to get the professionals to sweep the room or building for you.

"Those detectors are like cheap toys and there is no guarantee they will work," said the former Negri Sembilan Anti-Corruption Agency director who is a certified fraud examiner as well as a forensic polygraph examiner.

He said this when asked about reports that the sale of spy detectors had risen since the video of former Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek having sex with a woman in a hotel room had become public.

Using two spy detectors, Akhbar showed the difference in their efficacy: the one costing RM129 (looking like a car remote) only showed the presence of a pinhole spy camera when it was 12cm to 15cm near it whereas the one costing US$1,500 (RM4,900) detected the camera from the next room 4m away. The sophisticated detector also had a screen that showed what was being recorded on the camera.

Akhbar said many of the detectors being sold and bought were mainly for wireless cameras, not the hard-wired ones.

"Hard-wired cameras require physical search. You're looking for wires or objects that shouldn't be there, for example, a smoke detector in a bathroom, a potted plant with an electric wire coming out of it.

"Much harder are those in digital clocks because the power and video can go in/out on a cable that looks like the power cord," he said, adding that it could take two hours to debug a room 7m by 18m physically as well as by equipment.

Akhbar and his team of trained "sweepers" recently did a project that took five days.

"We are often called to debug rooms, buildings and new houses," he said.

Asked whether debugging of meeting rooms was a common feature of corporate work, he said that more companies were turning to it to ensure discussions remained confidential.

Akhbar said many of his clients were foreign companies but that the number of local companies was on the rise.