And if you do prove theft or sabotage?
Act. Don’t cover up. Rather, cover yourself—legally. Tell your boss what happened. If you’re mum and someone else reports the crime, your superior may consider you among the guilty. Also, don’t discount the possibility that your boss may himself be either guilty or a part of a cover-up because he fears a stockholders’ suit. You may have no choice but to report him to his boss. Press for an independent audit committee if you’re powerful enough and if the size of the crime justifies one.
Should you fire someone for a computer-related offense, do it artfully.
“If they’re in a critical job position, help them clean out their desk, collect their ID card and any office keys, and walk them to the door or to the personnel department,” says Timothy A. Schabeck, who edits Corporate and Computer Fraud Digest with Jack Bologna. The FBI’s Lewis says as much.
If you do prefer instant firing, follow Schabeck’s advice to provide counseling and severance pay. And soften the blow, too, by warning everyone, when hired, that your axes are quick and sharp.
Mightn’t instant firing, however, be brutal, anyway? Well, it depends on the amount of damage that a discharged employee could inflict and on how vindictive you perceive him to be. Ideally, you could minimize the damage by having backup disks or tapes out of the your victim’s reach. Also consider how successfully you can keep the fired employee from returning to your computer—by ruse or otherwise? Is your office absolutely physically secured? Can you trust guards or janitors working weekends not to admit a familiar face?
It’s all a part of bridging the gap between policy and practices.
Don’t just wait until a crime to make your staff security conscious.
Too often, warns James A. Schweitzer, a Xerox security expert, people protect information only if it’s on paper. He says, “There have been a number of cases where tapes and disks have mysteriously disappeared from places like desktops.” If need be, designate an employee to make sure others have locked up right by the end of the day. In less than a minute, using a floppy disk, a thief may duplicate hundreds of times as much material as he could on a paper copier.
Worry, too, about your people’s use of modems—the gizmos that transform your computers digital output into a whiny sound for the phone lines.