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Vindictive employees
Posted by

I've talked about employees and data security before in my business ideas blog. Outside hackers, as far more employers than will admit have found out, aren't the only way customer data and important company files get lost. When data such as customer lists and

important business procedures, testing results, drawings, or otherdocuments that are essential to the business' continuing operations get deleted from hard drives, the culprit may be a vindictive employee.

As Fox News reports, that's what recently happend to a business in Florida. In this case, the employee in good standing thought she was about to be fired and decided to get even by erasing data from the company computers.

While there are a lot of morals to this story, the thing business owners should be reminded of is the need to have backups (preferably daily or weekly) of all customer data and other business-critical data, and to store those backups off-site - where vindictive employees (and hackers) can't get ahold of it.

Posted on January 25, 2008 at 10:07 AM | Comments (2)

Comments

When I first hired employees, I was given the advice that, when terminating someone, to ask them to pack their things immediately and leave. I thought this was rather harsh. But after realizing what a vindictive employee could do to my business, I found it to be valuable advice. When having to let someone go, for whatever reason, I have paid them a month’s salary and asked them to leave immediately. I now give my clients the same advice.

Posted by: Peter George on January 31, 2008 at 11:44 AM

The Key to protecting your assets is implementing a few procedures. Remember, you cannot assure 100% protection – but reducing the risk of a breech is important. Things you can do to limit your risk and inform your employees you mean business:

1. Establish a solid electronic use policy that covers cell phones, email, instant messaging and blog entries. Remind the employees that those assets are owned by the company and that can and only be used for company business. Let them know that the company assets are monitored and they cannot assume there is any “employee privacy”.
2. Before the hiring begins, have verbiage in their employment offer that reminds them of the company’s confidentiality and non-disclosure policy. You can even add a non-solicit paragraph here too.
3. Upon the employee’s first day of employment, have them sign a formal confidentiality agreement which covers all assets of the company. The verbiage should include some verbiage that if the employee breaks the agreement, they may be responsible for all attorney costs and fees for them breaking the agreement.
4. Have all your policies within your employee manual.
5. Have the employees sign acknowledgement that they received the manual and any specific policies that are important to you.
6. Upon departure of their employment, send the employee a copy of their signed confidentiality agreement and remind them of their obligations.

Although the above suggestions are good ideas, they only limit the risk of IP infringement. But in the end, if it happens – you have a good case to protect yourself.

Cary Burch is CEO of LSSI a San Diego based software development company.

Posted by: Cary Burch on February 26, 2008 at 1:55 PM

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