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

Been there, done that

[k4]

Yes, of course admins with the ability to wreak major havoc at an organization should have to undergo background checks. Several years ago I worked at a Fortune 500 company, and there were no background checks done at all for IT staff. Turns out we hired a guy who used a fake name and someone else's social security number, and he worked as one of our main sysadmins for over a year, with privileges on probably 100 servers and full privileges on the email servers, before he was caught. I thought background checks were a waste of time until that...scared me half to death because no one had any idea what he'd done in all that time, and worse, no idea who he actually was.

Re: Ask yourself this question

[gidds]

Those figures mean absolutely nothing without corresponding figures from good employees.

If exactly 0% of good employees have arrest records, then an arrest record would be a pretty good indicator of malicious intent; while it wouldn't allow you to catch the other 70% of baddies, it would give you pretty conclusive evidence against that 30%.

If, on the other hand, the records for good employees were the same (which I suspect is closer to the truth), then an arrest record (or lack of one) would tell you absolutely nothing about an employee's trustworthiness.

And if the records for good employees were generally higher than for bad ones, then an arrest record would be an indicator in FAVOUR of hiring, not against!

So, worrying as those numbers might sound, they're utterly meaningless here without some context and background!