Are Background Checks Necessary For IT Workers?

4foot10 writes "UBS PaineWebber learned a hard lesson after hiring an IT systems admin without conducting a background check. Now its ex-employee is slated to be sentenced for launching a 'logic bomb' in UBS' computer systems that crashed 2,000 of the company's servers and left 17,000 brokers unable to make trades."

Comments

Re:Ask yourself this question

[gr84b8]

Invest some trust in your employees. Verify that the trust is deserved. Punish breaches of trust.

That's pretty naive. It certainly depends on the job, but many jobs have to use background checks. For example, if a financial institution followed your 'trust them until they break your trust' rule they could expose hundreds of thousands of people's personal information. Its common that you have to hire someone immediately who will need access to confidential information - in that case it is the responsible thing to do to perform a background check. Even with non-confidential positions its pretty easy to hire a psycho and only find out once they do something crazy - I've certainly seen it happen.

Re:Only as much as every other position...

[initialE]

There is a difference. IT people don't get laid.

Yes, it is significant.

Re:Ask yourself this question

[toadlife]

"Especially exchange. If you have access to reset a password in exchange then you can read anyones email." There are ways around this but Microsoft didn't feel like it needed to be implemented."

By all means, don't let your ignorance of Exchange and Windows keep you from acting like an authority on how it works.