The Risk of Malicious and Vengeful Employees

Think it can’t happen to your organization?

The situations outlined below don’t happen at every company, and therefore are often overlooked or brushed off with a simple “that won’t happen to us” attitude.  But it does happen to some companies and the consequences can be significant.  You can liken it to a tree falling on your house.  Will it happen?  Probably not; but if it does happen and you do not have a contingency plan or insurance to cover the repair costs, you could find yourself without shelter and huge expenses to “get back to normal.”

Below are some real world consequences and expense of vengeful employees and the costly effects of their malicious actions. This list highlights examples of the damage caused by disgruntled employees who retain access to systems:

  1. For several days, a $1 billion per year computer monitor manufacturer’s Taiwan    office was unable to access critical files that were deleted by a former network  administrator that had been terminated 2 weeks earlier.
  2. A former AS/400 programmer caused $80,000 in damages to his former employer after breaking in from a remote location.
  3. After being terminated, a former administrator to a transportation services company deleted the company’s customer database and changed system passwords.
  4. After being fired, a former employee accessed his company’s servers, deleted 675 files, changed access control levels, altered billing records and sent e-mail with false statements about the company to hundreds of its customers.

Excerpt from The Definitive Guide to Security Management (Realtimepublishers.com) written by Dan Sullivan-http://www3.ca.com/ebook/

How can this be prevented?

As a business owner, one must take the necessary steps to take ownership of their companies most critical data.  Those steps consist of a well thought out business contingency plan involving the protection of data and ability to restore that data in a timely manner as to not disrupt normal operations.

One such step is to employee a company that can back up your data in a secure environment as well as to a remote location(s) in which adheres to regulatory statues (i.e. Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA). 
CoreVault has the ability to backup your files without having the knowledge of an IT administrator or needing a sophisticated IT staff.

CoreVault has the right online backup solution for companies like yours that are serious about protecting their business-critical data. For more information on CoreVault solutions, visit www.axisglobalpartners.com/solutions/secure_corevault.asp or call 305.418.9440.

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