Angry Employees Downloading Viruses And Spyware On Purpose?
from the take-that dept
While external hack attacks have surpassed disgruntled employees causing problems, that doesn't mean those disgruntled employees don't exist. While the more technically minded disgruntled employees may cause problems by shutting down a computer system or some other nasty little trick, apparently some upset employees are taking to a different form of corporate "civil disobedience." 23% of companies surveyed claim that they believe upset employees are downloading viruses and other malicious software on purpose just to cause trouble (the article doesn't make it clear how these companies knew the downloads were on purpose -- so you could question the study on that point). This doesn't go quite as far as the employee who wrote and sent out a virus to colleagues, but it certainly seems like the type of internal "hack" less technically savvy employees might try. Still, the overall impact of a company with any decent security software is likely to be minimal. Update: Ed Bott digs a little deeper and questions the study. His concerns are probably accurate.
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CYA
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Re: CYA
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How they know it's on purpose
If the logs show somebody searching google for VX information, seeking out exploit sites, and then downloading .arj files named for worms, then hunting around for a .arj extractor and downloading that, it's rather obvious what was going on.
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hottie in marketing...
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