Hire smartly and protect your company from malicious insider attacks
The HR Manager for CarzOnRent, which is one of India’s leading car rental companies and a Smart Hiring customer, confided in me that a driver under threat of losing a job, would damage the car before he is shown the door. The car is a very expensive company’s asset; therefore, the threat is a cause of alarm for the company. This is just one of the reasons that the companies need to understand the psyche of the person before hiring them.
According to a news report, Microsoft has warned companies to expect an increase in security attacks by insiders or dissatisfied laid-off workers.
Doug Leland from Microsoft predicts that with around 1.5 million job losses in the US alone, the companies are at increased risk and exposure to these attacks.
In the last recession phase of 2002, Shekhar Verma, an ex-employee of Mumbai-based Geometric Software Solutions Company and a computer engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, stole $60 million worth of confidential information from his company. This includes source codes for a software product created for Geometric Software’s US-based client, SolidWorks. He was caught trying to sell the source codes and other information to Solidworks competitors for a fortune. FBI and CBI tracked him down before he could do more damage and arrested him.
According to BBC reports, Symantec, the world’s top security software maker also agreed to the fact that this financial downturn would lead to an increase in such cases where the insiders would try to sabotage the company’s reputation. Kevin Rowney, founder of the Data Loss Prevention Unit quotes, “People are motivated by revenge, fear, or greed”.
Therefore, whether you are a car rental company, a software company, or a pharmaceutical organization, you have a reason to worry. If you have valuable company information that you want to safeguard, your data security mechanism will go a long way to protect them. Having said that, the first step is to ensure that you understand your employees or candidates psychological profile so that you do not hire people who foster feelings of revenge, fear, or greed.
