Industrial espionage is not involved here. This is just reverse engineering that escalated into something that might be misconduct.

Espionage would include things like illegally surveilling the competitor's networks, bribing their employees for information and credentials, using malware to create backdoors, social engineering, blackmail, poaching their talent and incentivizing unethical disclosure of trade secrets, and cracking systems that explicitly bar access.

Reverse engineering their product through public IPs is legally acceptable up to CFAA boundaries, which are fuzzy, and it's not clear what kind of exploits were involved in this situation. They may have been relatively benign reverse engineering, or they may have been something associated with civil and criminal penalties.