Study Show Link Between IT Sabotage, Work Behavior 325
narramissic writes "According to recent research by the U.S. military and CERT, workers who sabotage corporate systems are almost always IT workers who are disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."
An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
qz
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Macleod concluded: "So as far as doing the right thing, I'd suggest that you start from the basis that your IT staff are the biggest risk to your organization's security, and if anyone of them disputes this, remember that arguing with colleagues was one of the clear signs of an impending attack."
Basically, if management accuses IT of being a huge risk, and their IT staff is actually honest and dependable, should they stand up for themselves, that's a sign that you should trust them even less??
Give me a freaking break.
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
This is bunk.
How many disgruntled Automotive Industries went on a shooting spree and NEVER gave any signs? Most. Same for the classic Postal Workers...
And what about the guy in Office Space?
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Oh come on, that company must have sent out about a million memos.
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Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
Here I thought that:
So m
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It's deeper than that. This is fundamentally due to the religion of absolute egalitarianism.
Think about it,
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I can't back this up with a study (you didn't back your stat up, so it's fair game), but it seems obvious that people who post to Slashdot are several TIMES more likely to be involved in computer crime than the average American (they have a high degree of technical knowledge, and often an outsider social perspective). So I agree. Let's do away with all of this "innocent until p
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If you've got the kind of work environment that disgruntles and demotivates your employees, it's vastly more likely that one of them will be pissed off enough to steal from the company.
I'd never do something as unprofessional as sabotage, but I've worked for companies before that made me "disgruntled" and "paranoid". Praise invariably passing up the chain and blame dripping downwards will do that to an organisation. Given this it's hardly surprising that demotivated people
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Interesting)
If any of the witches in your organization denies being a witch, remember that arguing with colleagues about it is one of the clear signs of impending witchcraft.
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Don't start in on blade weilding maniacs either. I've trained martially since I was a kid
Thankfully I seem to be a relatively well adjusted individual.
Mandatory Holy Grail (Score:4, Funny)
Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
VILLAGER #1:
Are there?
VILLAGER #2:
Ah?
VILLAGER #1:
What are they?
CROWD:
Tell us! Tell us!...
BEDEVERE:
Tell me. What do you do with witches?
VILLAGER #2:
Burn!
VILLAGER #1:
Burn!
CROWD:
Burn! Burn them up! Burn!...
BEDEVERE:
And what do you burn apart from witches?
VILLAGER #1:
More witches!
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry. I guarantee you'll regret being such an jerk to people when you're passing middle age and you've got mountains of "stuff" to your name but not a real friend in the world.
Re:An ounce of prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry. I guarantee you'll regret being such an jerk to people when you're passing middle age and you've got mountains of "stuff" to your name but not a real friend in the world.
That's not the choice. People of this makeup chose between having lots of stuff and no friend versus having few things and no friends. Maybe they'll wise up enough to regret being a jerk, but it's not a given IMHO.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is pretty naive.
Maybe you ought to get some experience first. I can't say much about the rest of the paragraph, but it sounds to me like your friends don't tirelessly work to bail you out of problems of your own making (eg, bar fights).
Don't get deluded you can rely on anyone but yourself when times get tough. Pack your own parachute.
Good advice, but we don't only want friends around when times get tough.
For example, jobs. With two similar resumes, who is going to be taken for a position,
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Life expectancy of a fucking dumb ass playing at IT management, and then bragging about it? Roughly 3 femtoseconds.
So go ahead - collect all your "stuff", and lose your friends (if you ever had any).
Oh and btw, you CAN'T take it with you.
It doesn't work that way (Score:5, Insightful)
_If_ he's a sociopath (you can't diagnose that from just one message), it just doesn't work that way. You're making the usual mistake of assuming that all humans are essentially, well, equally human and you only need appeal to someone's humanity/feelings/moral-sense/flash-of-enlightenm
Sociopathy is, simply put, completely lacking the empathy and connection to other humans. It's being the only human in a single-player world full of generic NPCs. They're not your peers, they don't matter, their feelings don't matter, they're there just to be used, abused, manipulated, lied to, whatever gets you closer to your objectives.
Think of your relationship to NPCs in a computer game. Do you really care what that generic NPC in Oblivion or GTA feels or thinks? Do you care if he/she had a bad day, or if his/her kid is sick? Would you feel any sense of accomplishment of having him/her as a friend? Would you feel bad for clicking on a complete lie dialogue choice just to finish a quest? Would you even really think of them as a "he" or a "she", or more along the lines of "it"? I mean, don't be silly, it's just a game and just a scripted NPC. Right?
Well, in a nutshell that's the kind of world that a sociopath lives in. You can't even be seen as a friend by one. You're at most a sucker to be used for a purpose, even if that purpose is a few minutes of entertainment.
So expecting that one would wake up one day and think "man, I wasted my life, I should have made friends" is naive. That's the kind of notion that doesn't even compute in their world. Or not for the same meaning of "friend" that you'd use.
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Um, who said that his employees had to be his friends? He could have alot of outside of work friends with the same habits or toys that he has. His employees won't belong to his social set. Friends in his social circle could help in job leads or networking contacts that could help a family member start off making more than his e
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But as the grandparent said, not a real friend.
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http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/
Perhaps for some... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because people go into IT because "they heard it was a good field to get into".
The people who are good at IT are hard to replace and are usually rewarded that way. There's no doubt that when you break into the field it's rough. But that's when you distinguish yourself. Your hard work didn't stop the day you graduated from a university... oh wait... you didn't go to a University?
Okay, let's start at the beginning:
1) The IT field is littered with has-been's, wanna-be's and never-was-es. Don't be one of those. How?
2) Show a commitment. Get a degree from a University. Doesn't matter what it is; if you're smart, you turn that to your advantage. If you want to be involved in the business, get a degree in business with a lot of programming courses. If you want to be involved primarily in the bits and bytes, get a degree more closely related to Computer Science. Information Management can be useful too, although the too are not at all similar. I have a computer science degree, my wife has an information management degree. I'm the director of architecture at a fortune 1000, she's a program manager at a fortune 2000.
3) Where's the Sysadmin paths? Unfortunately, the days of the Unix Admin with infinite knowledge have all passed. Well, not all. There are a few old timers left. God bless them, love them to death. They're really smart, and those last few guys get paid a lot. The rest? A dead end job. It puts food on the table. It's better than working at Wal-Mart.
4) All the good jobs in IT require that you start as a programmer. No exceptions. If you're not good at programming, you don't belong in IT.
5) Set your sights on moving up. You don't want to be the 45 year old programmer. Not unless you're so good that people just leave you alone to develop. If you're not sure you're that good, then you aren't. If you are that good, you can tell because your boss never hassles you about your hours, or anything. They let you alone because you're the goose laying the golden egg. God bless you. You are the heart and soul of this industry.
6) You've got to pay your dues in IT, and you may move around some. Changing jobs every 9 months guarantees you'll be a 50 year old programmer some day who knows VB6 really well and suddenly finds themselves without work.
7) Get better all the time. Read read read. Be energetic.
8) Understand the business you're in. Unless you aspire to #5. Push for ways to improve the business. And that doesn't include suggesting changes to the SCM.
9) Develop a 6th sense about what will help your career. Usually that goes hand in hand with helping the business but not always. When the two diverge, it might be time to leave. You don't want to be the 60 year old programmer who is good at FORTRAN on VAX. If I have to explain this to you, then you shouldn't be looking for a job in IT.
10) If you don't love this field, if you don't go into work in the morning because you can't imagine not doing it, then you don't belong in this field.
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I'm the director of operations for our company and definately would not hire you with that attitude.
IT is NOT about University Degrees, sorry but 9 out of 10 people that go to college for this industry are the ones who don't belong here. Naturals are the best in this industry plain and simple, the kid who goes home every day and spends 6 hours a night learning on his own are the ones with the
Blindingly Obvious Research Concludes Blindingly O (Score:3, Funny)
Oh so true. (Score:3, Funny)
Careful, making cynical comments like that may negatively affect your career prospects. Don't want to get labled as a whiner, people might think your planning to nuke the servers and fire you.
Especially if your bosses who are disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly.
Oh no!
This story really needs to be filed under, "The best way to improve moral is to fire all the unhappy people."
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Two years later I get to thinking how I never got an e-mail from anyone...
log into the server and presto! access. Well, I think, maybe they left my user rights because I have a homedir there... Nope! I can still access admin and privileged functions. I have to admit that the thought occoured to me to drop the ACL for everyone and claim ignorance,
You don't have to do it. (Score:2)
didn't do it, but I did indulge in a daydream about it :-)
People who act like assholes, eventually, are surrounded by the same. The result is disaster. Incompetence is self sabotaging, the problem is they are always looking for someone else to blame.
Next time, make sure they remove your access and then never look back.
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they just want their red stapler back.
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obligatory 2: Monkey Boy. (Score:2)
They also sweat profusely throw chairs.
You are so fired, Joe... (Score:3, Funny)
Access (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Access (Score:5, Insightful)
sure... the IT guys are the problem.
Re:Access (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the users. (Score:2)
as opposed to the armies of users that "sabotage" the desktops and network resources on a daily basis? sure... the IT guys are the problem.
Only when the IT guys chose software that's easy to "sabotage." Are 25% of your desktops part of a bot net? Do you blame your users for that?
Security huh! (Score:3, Funny)
In related news (Score:2)
Bias? (Score:2, Funny)
This is groundbreaking!
Pop psych bull setting up suits for major disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
This is groundbreaking!
And while we're at it: How many employees who do NOT sabotage corporate systems "are disgruntled", "are paranoid", "generally show up late", and/or "argue with colleagues"?
Last time I looked:
- A large fraction of the best IT people often work late, for any or all of several reasons: They prefer it, they need to work when load is light to minimize impact on business processes, fixing what the users broke during the day skews the time of their peak workload to later than that of the mainstream users, etc.
They often work more than a normal workday - but they'd have to work two shifts every day and only take time out for sleep, in order to come in bright and early to impress the suits who read this "study". But any sane IT professional will take advantage of flex time and come in late instead.
Programmers and other IT professionals coming in late has been a stereotype since computers used vacuum tubes. (I know because I was there and was one of many who created it. B-) )
- "Argue with colleagues"? Maybe yes-maning works in the executive suite. But when a crew of experts is chasing down a problem there will be a slew of hypotheses tried and discarded, with different workers coming up with different hypotheses and evidence to falsify them. To an outsider this looks like an argument, when it's actually progress. Experts will also often have differing opinions and will discuss them - ditto.
(I recall one company where upper-level executives quietly added themselves to an engineering internal mailing list. There we discussed the latest problems - often heatedly - until they were solved. When one was solved the traffic on THAT problem stopped cold and another would take its place. To the suits it looked like a disaster, when in fact the project was on time, within budget, exceeding targets, and still looked like it would have been a quantum leap when delivered - if the company hadn't suddenly shut it down...)
- "disgruntled"? With the continuing budget shortfalls, IT resource expansion always lagging company growth, lusers opening virus email,
- "paranoid"? (I presume we're talking the folk etymology, not clinical paranoia.) IT, like other forms of engineering, is an exercise in staying at least one step ahead of Murphy's Law. If an IT professional isn't "paranoid" he's not doing his job.
Watch the suits who saw this start canning their best IT people - zero-notice style. (That's where the employee arrives at work to find his cardkey doesn't work his passwords are rescinded, and he is escorted to HR where he is handed two weeks pay in lieu of notice, a box containing anything from his desk that the company didn't think was theirs, and a threatening document in lawyerese, and then kicked out of the building.)
And of course the fired employees will be blamed when the network starts to go to hell when the remaining people can't apply duct tape and chewing gum fast enough or the next rash of malware gets past the firewall.
= = = =
This reminds me of the "profiles" of school-age mass-murderers: They're always described as loners and introverts who don't get along with others in their school. In other words, just like all the nerds who get pounded on by the jocks and snubbed by the cheerleaders and queen-bees and react by withdrawing from contact with the "beautiful people" cliques. And every time one of these "studies" come out the administrators (generally former "beautiful people" themselves) dump on the nerds and side with the jocks that much more...
Re:Pop psych bull setting up suits for major disas (Score:2)
Interesting. This happened to me on monday. Being the lead security analyst for th
Re:Pop psych bull setting up suits for major disas (Score:2)
Straight from the "No sh*t Sherlock" Department: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Straight from the "No sh*t Sherlock" Department (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a boss at (insert large corporation) who disrespected me, never allowed me to be challenged, set me up on a doomed project on my second week of work with people who didn't understand the business - and generally pissed me off. I was cussed out by the CIO and his Italian mobster friend who claimed to be a business manager.
After the second month I would have fit into most of those categories - simply because of the experience I'd had. I decided that my boss didn't deserve anything other than what was in my job description. I proceeded to immerse myself in the codebase, business, and financials. After a couple of months I was answering questions in meetings which the original developers didn't even know.
There on out, I involved myself in other projects, got involved in design and generally worked my way past my boss - though he was still my boss until he was layed off.
In the end, I was one of the architects. All the people who made my life miserable were fired, left, or otherwise shown the door. They caused millions of dollars in losses - and I made the company millions.
Moral of the story: Sometimes it's management.
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Those people (you) aren't the kind of person that TFA is describing.
The point of TFA is that there is a certain subset of people whose psychology will push them to become aggressively hostile to their employer in response to the types of pressure that you faced.
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indeed... here is yet another anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
At one point I was drawn into an "argument" with colleagues over two things:
1) they needed a new box to run the firewall on. Owners wanted to postpone indefinitely. Sysadmin pressed his point. CEO suspected sabotage or other agenda... in spite of having had a prior avoidable firewall failure take down the network. He decided the sysadmin was crying wolf, or worse.
2): graphic designers and marketing people had proposed, priced and designed a website concept without consulting the guy who was going to code it. There were problems in the executability of the design and an underbid situation.
A technical problem that could be solved with a technical approach, if there were trust. Once again, sysadmin/webmaster "argued" for another approach on technical grounds. Answer: defenses, emotionalism, circle the wagons.
Net result of both contentions: emotionalism, accusations; sysadmin forced to resign.
The firewall did have a hardware failure after about six months; the website proposal flopped and the company lost their major client's web work. Satisfaction for the sysadmin? H**l no. There are no winners in something like this. You need to work with people you can trust and who trust you. This untrusted crap is destroying the very idea of "a good job" and consuming businesses and relationships from within.
You have to be able to air the relative merits of various technical approaches in a respectful, professional way so that what's rational and feasible emerges.
If this is "arguing with colleagues", resulting in an immediate security red-flag and dismissal... how can you have peer review or objective discussions? Worse still, it means we've descended into a totalitarian workplace.
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I want to get the job done right, and that's it.
The workplace is, limitedly, a totalitarian place - and the only way to rise above it is to not play the human games all the time and stick to the job you were hired to do. Most importa
Lucky you. (Score:2)
Had there been a failure, the only competent person (aka Mr. Moody) would have been blamed.
Re:Straight from the "No sh*t Sherlock" Department (Score:2)
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Well, all that may be true... (Score:5, Funny)
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but I also happen to be far too lazy to do any of that shit.
At least one person modded you insightful. To do true evil you have to be really driven. It might even involve extra hours. I'm feeling tired just thinking about it.
Really? (Score:2)
News at elev...whenever I feel like it, get off my back!
Not so obvious. (Score:2)
Angry workers more likely to sabotage systems...
That or those who let it show are more likely to be caught or blamed.
Tamping down management paranoia (Score:3, Insightful)
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Management is paranoid that the IT people are going to sabatoge them, so they turn the screws on IT. The people in IT become demoralized, shart showing up late, are disgruntled, more likely to snap at management, etc. Eventually one of them may snap and sabatoge the place on their way out.
The real problem, in a lot of cases, starts out with paranoia and territorial pissing matches to see who controls the budget for what and who can make
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Anyone who broadcasts they are going to cause harm is quite stupid because when harm occurs they get the blame, even if they didn't do it. Perfect cover for the guy who really did the dirty deed.
hehehe (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I have a hunch that managers fall broadly into two categories:
- Those that have both the critical thinking skills to draw that conclusion and the management skills to keep their employees happy so that they don't need it;
- Those that, like "Calum Macleod of Cyber-Ark", draw a conclusion with the cause and effect the wrong way around, _and_ bring it to their employees in the form of an ultimatum!
' Macleod concluded: "So as far as doing the right thing, I'd suggest t
half sight (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, so? (Score:5, Funny)
Disgrutled = Forced to install Notes
Paranoid = Forced to sit next to Notes Server all day waiting for the memory leak to take over
Late = Due to sleep deprevation from having to go in at 2am to reboot the Notes Server
Argumentative = Caught whispering "Exchange, bitches." under his breath
Poor Performer = Changed Cert ID password to "Fuck Notes"
Whats not to understand?
Re:Yeah, so? (Score:4, Funny)
Paranoid = Forced to recheck Exchange database
Late = Had to stay up all night while Exchange tested databases
Argumentative = Caught whispering 'Postfix, bitches'
Poor Performer = Changed Exchange password to 'kill me now'
What's not to understand?
(I've never worked with Notes, so it could be as bad as you say, but I've worked with Exchange 2K and 2K3, and yup, it's painful).
Work with both, then post (Score:5, Insightful)
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Those who think Postfix is a suitable replacement for Exchange don't understand the power of Exchange. Those who think Exchange is a suitable replacement for Notes don't understand the power of Notes.
Re:Work with both, then post (Score:5, Funny)
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Me: You have a 16 gigabyte mail file with 20,000 unread messages in your inbox and 100+ folders
Executive VP: What's a gigabyte?
All day, everyday
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Paranoid = Afraid Someone will find out about said exchange
Late = Lack of sleep due to World Of Warcraft / Late night programming session
Argumentative = "We don't need a new gazillion dollar server"
Poor Performer = Did 30 jobs in a week and missed the KPI level by 1 as each job was bigger than the beancounters.
I would have thought these were the traits of a GOOD sysadmin...
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+5 Funny? methinks +5 Informative
Of course, the flip side (Score:4, Informative)
The flip side is that the fastest way for management to make a worker into someone who's disgruntled, paranoid, shows up late, argues all the time and performs poorly is to treat them like a potential problem. You're giving people privileged access, either you trust them and thus don't need to worry until after they start showing obvious signs, or you don't trust them in which case why are you giving them privileged access in the first place?
To be honest, I think if you have to worry about abuse of privileged access after termination then you have a more fundamental problem that no access-management system will solve. After all, if you can't trust someone to behave professionally after you've given them their 2-weeks' notice then what makes you think you can trust them to behave professionally before that?
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I remember once at Apple, a co-worker put this compiled executable AppleScript into a user's startup items folder (this was back in the Mac OS 7.x days)
tell application finder
shut down
end tell
The user came in, started up his machine (it was his backup "solitaire" CPU) and it immediately shut down upon launching the Finder.
An hour later, he had the machine apart, and was ready to swap power supplies with a donor machine. We had a good laugh and told him
Yeah but... (Score:3, Interesting)
the quiet meek ones will come in with automatic weapons and start "cutting expenses" when they leave.
I fear the quiet meek ones. They frighten me.
Thinly veiled ad (Score:5, Insightful)
"According to security management vendor Calum Macleod of Cyber-Ark..Macleod's solution is password management....'If privileged password management is not on your shopping list in 2007 it may already be too late.'"
This is preceded with a 'people who say you shouldn't buy my product may already be criminals':
"'if anyone of them disputes this, remember that arguing with colleagues was one of the clear signs of an impending attack.'"
I can't believe this ran! This reporter was shockingly lazy.
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That's it! We've found one! Turn in your keycard and know that we are changing all passwords!
Best to stay on top of any unrest... (Score:5, Interesting)
But seriously, you could swap IT for any discipline and come up with the same bullet-point: "Study Shows Link Between Grounds Keeping Sabotage, Work Behavior" - so what's the point? Just because I hold your entire work history in my shaky, sweaty hands doesn't mean I will automatically go postal and cause trouble for you and your unborn grandchildren. A cafeteria worker can spit in the soup. A parking security wanker can key your new Astro. A disgruntled department head can arbitrarily black mark a borderline performance appraisal.
Screw this generalized dust-kickup of a 'study' and go talk to anyone you think just needs someone to listen. If they tell you they "can't talk...busy...voices said time to clean my guns", then you might want to restrict their security access for a while. Otherwise, treat them like humans and stop watching for signs the sky is getting ready to fall.
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Oh really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Either you cut-and-pasted, or you have a really weird sense of squirrel "happiness."
useless (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nearly useless information. By analogy, nearly 100% of rapists are male, yet very few males are actually rapists.
in other words (Score:2)
what about work treatment? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about workers who are routinely abused? Workers who are pushed to make themselves desperate (financially desperate, usually) to keep the job so they can be treated like slaves, and who are then forced to work long hours for no extra pay because they're salaried, constantly threatened with termination, blamed for problems but denied power to deal with them, and so on, did the study account for that? Doesn't look like the study did. Study talks about "work behavior" but not "work treatment", as if companies have no effect on whether a worker would want to sabotage something.
Ignoring signs-- signs such as a person coming in late who had always come in on time in the past-- is a sure invitation to trouble. People who feel they can't communicate one way will communicate another way. Maybe before concluding that someone who is causing "trouble" better be escorted off the premises in handcuffs before they can do real damage, management ought to try a few other things first. Like, listen in such a way that workers feel they can speak openly. And removing the temptation. If a nuclear missile could be launched with the push of one button, it probably would've happened. Good thing the missiles require several keys, codes, and such like.
This study strikes me as narrow.
Smart enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to the loading dock guys? (Score:2)
Double agents are the best agents (Score:2)
Checklist... (Score:2)
"almost always IT workers who are disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."
Disgruntled = Management listens to outside consultants and does random IT stuff instead of listening to our advice? Check.
Paranoid = Teaching outside consultants every detail about my job. Check.
Late = Stay up late playing computer games. Check.
Argumentative = Learned about this one years ago. No Check. WHEW!
Poor Performer = Sarbanes Oxley procedures in place lowering p
Yeah, I'd buy something from this guy....NOT (Score:5, Insightful)
IT Workers, or Supervisors? (Score:2)
Sounds like most of my prior bosses.
Theory "X" Lives... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting, I can think of a few more..... (Score:3, Funny)
This Just In! (Score:2)
FDSBtP: "because ordinary criminals never exhibit other negative behavior"
FDSBtP: "because ordinary criminals are model citizens who just, one day, snapped"
So the real title of the submission should be.... (Score:2)
Cure - kill the asshole managers. (Remember, the study was sponsored by the Military - that is their typical response to a problem isn't it?)
Well... (Score:3, Funny)
Aren't the IT people the only ones who smart enough to sabotage IT systems?
I mean, those smug assholes up on the 42nd floor don't give a shit about how hard we work just to help them print their e-mail. We'll see how smug they are when....
oh...wait...
[BOFH]
This is really stupid!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that a lot of you out there will be thinking, "hell ya, it is managements fault we are treating like this so lets get back at them but destroying their systems."
Believe me guys that is not the case, the only people you hurt are your co-workers. I joined a company where a lot of the Admin stuff were fired. Some of them left nice little surprises that went off a couple of days later. Guess who was there until 3am in the morning putting everything back together? I can tell you it wasn't the managers. I can also tell you that those guys that got fired lost many good friends the day they did that and a lot of hard earned respect. Most of them are still looking for jobs a year later as NO ONE from their previous job (which many had held for 6+ years) will give them a good reference anymore because of their actions.
So my point is that if you are pissed off at management then complain or leave. Don't destroy things as it only hurts your co-workers not management.
On the flip side... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were "disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."
How exactly does that make these people easy to spot? What distinguishes them from anyone else fired from an IT position?
This article stinks.
Macleod concluded: "So as far as doing the right thing, I'd suggest that you start from the basis that your IT staff are the biggest risk to your organization's security, and if anyone of them disputes this, remember that arguing with colleagues was one of the clear signs of an impending attack.
I wouldn't recommend taking that attitude with ANY branch of your organization unless you're looking for a fight. Oh no! I might be one of them!
McCarthyism again... (Score:2)
No Shinola, Sherlock!
"Anybody who disagrees with me is a threat to the company who should immediately be fired."
Even a PHB should be able to recognize THAT one.
But watch the ones who don't see through it start hamstringing their IT departments, firing their best IT people and executive-suite sanit
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But if there is a nine year old girl who understands UNIX handy you should be ok.