Insiders, everybody’s got ’em.

Opinion

Jun 14, 20082 mins

The latest conviction in an insider hacking case serves as a reminder that most organizations are not prepared for the rogue employee. I remember hearing stories of one legendary IT guy that left a ticking time bomb behind that would check the payroll records every week. If his name was not on the list his script would (and did) systematically start erasing records. Dastardly behavior but all too common amongst the StarTrek paraphernalia set.

Kudos to the investigators in the The Council of Community Health Clinics case who tracked down a disgruntled employee who resigned after an unfavorable review. He accessed the organization’s systems, turned off back up procedures, and deleted a lot of records. Even though he had gone to the trouble of rebuilding all of his home machines to cover his tracks they got him based on the identity of a printer on his home network. Good work.

My advice: don’t be afraid to institute checks and balances when it comes to your IT staff. Executives should go ahead and demand admin access rights on critical systems in case the top IT folks have to be locked out. Create off-site back up procedures and make sure you have adult supervision for the IT staff.

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by Richard Stiennon

Contributor

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.