Slashdot Mirror
Recession Pushes More Workers To Steal Data
An anonymous reader writes to share the findings of a recent transatlantic survey which suggests that the recession is pushing workers to be a little bit more accommodating when it comes to sharing, viewing, or stealing sensitive information from the company they work(ed) for. "Pilfering data has become endemic in our culture as 85% of people admit they know it's illegal to download corporate information from their employer but almost half couldn't stop themselves taking it with them with the majority admitting it could be useful in the future! [...] The survey entitled 'the global recession and its effect on work ethics,' carried out for a second year by Cyber-Ark – found that almost half of the respondents 48% admit that if they were fired tomorrow they would take company information with them and 39% of people would download company/competitive information if they got wind that their job was at risk. Additionally a quarter of workers said that the recession has meant that they feel less loyal towards their employer."
Unless I make enough money to retire debt free, no deal.
Most people will get caught and lose their jobs for tiny amounts of money and poor future job prospects
You can't steal what's free.
Open source ftw!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Once my company's competitor learns I know how much Bob from accounting or Joanne from HR make, I'm sure they will shower me with Andrew Jackson's business cards.
And then I woke up :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Cyber-Ark just happens to have a product that helps prevent this.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Speaking of professional ethics, who wants to bet that a survey sponsored by Cyber-Ark uses leading questions to produce results which bolster their business?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"Additionally a quarter of workers said that the recession has meant that they feel less loyal towards their employer."
I'd be happy to show some loyalty to my employer if they would but return the favor. Instead I'm treated as a simple expense on the accountant's balance sheets; one that's easily gotten rid of. The people who make the decisions are much too far removed from the people who make the product. Hell, I feel more loyalty to my favorite baseball team than I do to the corporation I work for.
surprise anyone? I mean come on in this recession anyone will do anything to have a competitive edge at getting the next 6 months worth of work. I don't hesitate to say that this trend started long before the recession and will probably continue long after its end. I know (End what's that)
At the moment I am looking for a change of job because my employer has basically told me to shut the frak up and "be grateful you have a job" and there will be no advancement for a couple of years. I work hard and smart and I'm sick of being taken advantage of so I've gathered up the passwords to the products we make and have been using them as part of my pitch to the competition. I've also made a copy of my .pst file because I'm contemplating a lawsuit against my current employer - but not until I have another job. I used to love my job but they've really pretty much abused me for a couple of years and now are using the global slowdown as an excuse to kick me around some more. No more, I say. I have no desire to hurt the company per se, but I am going to take anything and everything with me that will help me succeed with the competition and perhaps further my legal case. I don't trust "discovery" to discover much of anything.
Indeed. When execs are getting $10 mil bonus packages for burning a company to the ground, when the upper echelons are gutting pension plans by reneging on past promises and contracts and then turn around and pocket the savings for themselves, it should come as no surprise in the least that those of us further down the corporate ladder are taking a similarly opportunistic approach.
Social mammals tend to emulate the alpha individuals of their groups. The alphas, by dint of successfully establishing themselves as alphas, are viewed as successful -- "well, they're doing something right for themselves, guess it'd be smart for me to do the same." When sociopaths lead our companies, the employees themselves will, generally speaking, start behaving more sociopathically. It's basic survival.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Boss: Here's your paycheck, good job.
Worker: Your data is so safe. It's like motherfucking Fort Knox up in here.
*one week later*
Boss: You're fired.
Worker: I understand. Did you know information wants to be free. Particularly you're information. I happen to be an excellent consultant on wrangling information, as it is, and would like to offer you my services to stop your information from visiting anonymous FTP servers in Russia and China. Interested?
Boss: Here's your paycheck.
You can't steal music (except by stuffing CDs down your pants at the store) because the data is published (not to mention broadcast). Confidential information, on the other hand, can be "stolen" because, while you're still merely copying the data, you're stealing the secret.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Because I'm sure the people working IT would have different statistics, given that we generally have ALOT more access to ALOT more information. I can read people's emails, I can look up every work order, I can view everyone's hard drives, browser history, heck, anything leaving the company network gets some log by the proxy.
I'm sure IT guys could find alot more valuable information, and as such, might be more willing to sell it.
The survey asked banksters and Wall Street fraud artists: FTFA:
We already know that Wall Street and Canary Wharf are full of crooks. I suspect that among that bunch, the 41% is low - the other 59% probably lied.
Looking at your Slashdot name, that post takes on a bit of an ominous tone. Is "gave my notice" some kind of euphemism?
I'm sure that some people do try to profit from illicitly obtained information from their past employers; I've heard a few stories here and there about people getting busted. But there is simply no way that 50% of everyone in the workforce is doing this for a few simple reasons:
1. Risk - I think everyone is aware that the damage to your career and professional reputation would be catastrophic if you were caught, not to mention the legal ramifications.
2. Ethics - Yes, people do have them. Maybe not everyone is the pinnacle of ethical behavior, but that doesn't mean every other person you see at the office is just waiting to mug you and steal your wallet in the parking lot.
3. Nothing to steal - The majority of employees just don't have access to proprietary information that is actually of value outside the company. Sure, I could tell a future employer about my company's HR policies or give them an org chart. That might be very slightly useful, but certainly isn't going to get me hired or land me millions. I could also give them all of the company's internally developed code, but it would be of little use without all of the institutional knowledge, expertise and essentially the entire original company to go along with it.
4. Employers are liable as well - Take the case of the people who tried to sell some of Coke's trade secrets to Pepsi. They were refused, and Pepsi informed the police. They know that they would be liable for the illegal behavior as well, and want no part of it. Now not every employer operates above board, but it's a risky game to try to sell information to someone who may not even want to buy it.
So in summary: bullshit.
If the data is so sensitive, you'd think that a company would bother to change the passwords periodically so employees that have been let go can't get back into the system. However, security doesn't seem to be a terribly high priority so companies shouldn't be surprised when things like this actually happen.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"Causality error" in that they've mistaken the (observed) effect as a "cause". The fact is, the "global recession" has merely revealed a decline in workers' "ethics" that was already there and which had been forming for at least the past several decades. Despite what the talking heads (in both media and the government) are saying, this "economic downturn" is nowhere near as bad as the "Great Depression"; this according to the many "oldsters" I am in frequent conversation with -- my own parents included -- who actually lived through the period rather than merely learning about it from the history books -- and their recollections do not include such a widespread deterioration in the "morals" (their word -- read "ethics") of the population (and yes there were notable exceptions, some accounts of which are a little scary even to modern ears, but by and large people -- at least in this part of the country -- still left their doors unlocked at night; I triple-locked my doors almost religiously during even the much lauded "economic boom time" of just a few years ago!!) Poverty does not cause crime any more than crime causes poverty (including but not by any means limited to the "victims" of Mr. Madoff -- their poverty was caused by a mixture of greed and stupidity.)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Once your employer displays their intentions to sacrifice you for a fistful of dollars, you may feel that sacrificing their interest is also an option.
If the market is an ideal system, regulated by pure greed, then profit = good. Corporations have no morals, just greed.
In such an environment, what's wrong with an employee to seek the most profit from the employing corporation? As long as the employee turns positive cashflow post fines and prosecution fees everything should be fine. Even if the corporation goes bankrupt as a result; as long as the perpetrator's balance sheet is OK, collateral damage does not matter.
Right?
Humans still decent at survival! News at 11.
To answer that question, we should understand the theft in the total context of labor ethics. The current economic recession differs from the previous recession (during the dotcom bust) in 2 important ways. One difference is that it was caused by a failure of the banking system, which had placed financial bets on bad mortgages.
A second difference is that the "normal" lag between declining gross-domestic product (GDP) and rising unemployment was very short. In all previous recessions, the lag was at least 6 months. During this recession, the lag was much shorter. Once the typical employer saw declining orders for products or services, he immediately fired workers. This high-speed termination of workers was once the hallmark of the Silicon-Valley employer's mentality but has now spread to the rest of the nation.
The national unemployment rate exceeds 10 percent. In some states, the rate exceeds 12%.
By contrast, Japanese companies (for cultural reasons) and European companies (for both cultural reasons and legal reasons) make every effort to avoid firing workers during an economic recession. Although Americans once laughed at Europeans for favoring kinder, gentler labor policies that "hindered" economic growth, the Europeans now have the last laugh: the unemployment rate in America now exceeds the rate in several European countries.
The Americans favor a Darwinian system of employment: survival of the fittest. If you are "weak" and if you do not have the right political connections (e. g., being the beer-drinking buddy of the department head), then you will be fired. If you lose your home, your family, and commit suicide, then the Darwinian system gives only 1 reply: "Too bad, loser!"
In this context, we should not judge the morality of stealing sensitive data from your previous employer. If he fired you in response to the recession, then you should do whatever you need to do to survive. You should live by Darwinian rules. You do whatever you need to do and whenever you need to do "it".
manufacturing processes, marketing material, suppliers. etc etc.
Deleted
This number is understandable if it includes people exporting their Outlook contact folder.
When push comes to shove survival of the fittest rules all. When it comes down to the wire of being able to support yourself and provide for your family, morality is far less a consideration than providing is. Simply put, like it or not, morality is in the eye of the beholder and nature doesn't give a rat's ass how you FEEL about anything.
Company's that don't treat their employees like valued assets will discover it is the very foundation of their business which will turn on them when they need them most. The old-boys-club (or woman's club nowadays) can fall to ruin under the pressure of a survivalist-economy just as quickly as they can layoff a $30k worker in HR rather than cut $100k+ executive pay or bonuses by 1% in order to help keep that worker and their company strong.
No loyalty or sense of community = no loyalty or care of the communities well being.
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
In my case, I created everything worth stealing in our company, except the company name and the customer database. Sure, I got paid while doing it, but if it will benefit me in the future, I'll use it. I wouldn't steal customer info, but the tech stuff, you bet. All I'd be doing is stealing back my own time and effort, the way I see it.
I just got fired today for false accusations that I broke an NDA with my ex-employer.
Just got back from the lawyers office. I don't have much chance of getting the job back, even if I wanted it, but I'm preparing legal action if they ever disclose to future employers that I broke their NDA, because I in fact, did not. Yes, I can prove that.
Depending on how you ask the question, you'll get a different answer. Sensitive data range from a simple copy of the internal phone list, to a valuable dump of the client database. For programmers, I bet 95% would keep copies of minor programs they wrote believing they will be of use for them at a later job. Created on company time and therefore company owned perhaps, but that automatically mean any harm has been done.
The original article was lots of hype and scare tactics. What were they trying to sell again?
You call bullshit, but this survey is about how desperate and scared people are.
1. Risk - In the industry I work in, even before the Recession, theft of data has always been a huge issue. No, theft of data is no big deal at your local 7-11, but at businesses with regular customers, it could be a simple matter for a salesrep to snatch it's customer roll and sneak off, start their own company, and take these customers with them. the survey talked to 600 people in Canary Wharf London and Wall Street New York. That happens there all the time too. Risk is not the same across all industries, and we aren't talking about the coke formula, we are talking about orders, customers, item lists, stuff more basic than a super secret soft drink formula.
2. Canary Wharf, Wall Street... nuff said about ethics there. In general, I disagree in that, particularly in the states, that a majority of people are that loyal to their employer. I'm loyal to my employer because they pay me well, and because if I did come up with an idea to steal data, I'd completely botch it since I'm horrible at intrigue, deceit, lying, and anything else you'd need to pull off illicit behavior. However, I hold no huge ideal that I should be loyal to them just because it's the right thing to do. They haven't exactly been 100% loyal to me. And if there is even a sniff that I might be laid off, I'm not thinking of my company, I'm thinking about me and where my next mortgage payment is coming from. Layoffs are still rampant in the US, and layoffs do NOT garner loyalty. My company has had layoffs.
3. nothing to steal - your answer thinks of only one industry, software. I work in software and software is protected by patents and copyright in the states, so it's hard to steal because lawyers catch you and sue you. However, as I've stated, in my industry, our customers worry about data security all the time. Customer roles, item lists, pricing, all these things give you a competitive advantage if you can find out what they are. Pricing in business to business transactions is all over the place, it's not one price for all like in retail. Find out what you are selling to which customers for what prices, then find a way to beat those prices and quietly steal those customers away... and you have a disaster. You could start investigating who is stealing them, but by the time you find out you've lost a lot of business and it's not economically beneficial to try to sue the guy for damages in general. You might get something back but you don't want to do that at all, because lawyer fees are a pain and the return on investment isn't like it is at large software or soft drink companies. You can't patent a price list.
4. Employers are liable as well - see legal liability under #3. Also, a lot of these salesreps just go off and found their own companies and take their customers with them, so the company and person taking the liability are one and the same, meaning no more additional liability than before, and the same amount of risk. What's even worse is that if you lay a salesrep off, you can't steal his brain. If he just remembers this information in his head, it's not illegal. You just have to hope to provide better value or try to scare them with a noncompete clause, which these days can be broken easily.
The US is at 10% unemployment, and businesses to this day do whatever they can to maintain large executive bonuses while staying in the black, and while Wall Street continues to suck the money from them. Money is trickling up, not down, and people feel cheated out of jobs and homes. If they feel cheated, you damn well better believe the employees will cheat back if they think they can get away with it. The employers who did not do everything they could possibly think of to be loyal to their employees will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Would be interesting to see what information they consider corporate data. I'm guessing with a statistic that high it is more phone numbers of friends in the business you might call to find your next job. That is way different that downloading the companies source code to share with your next employer. A survey geared to sell the companies software is likely skewed with leading questions.
Last winter's blizzard I left 4 hours early. THEM: I'm sorry but you'll have to make up the time. ME: But I'm an exempt employee. Project needs some extra work. ME: Are you going to compensate me for my overtime? THEM: No, you're exempt. Well, ok then. I feel loyal (NOT).
So in the end, it's all about your ego being bruised ... ask anyone, you'll be the bigger person if you can just walk away from it. I know, when you feel they've ripped you a new one and left you bleeding on the sidewalk, that's hard to do, but it's not worth it.
Two men were walking along. Their religion forbade them from having any physical contact with women not their wives.
They came to a stream, and there was a woman there, who was too small and delicate to get across on her one.
One man silently picked her up and carried her across.
The other one watched in equally silent disapproval.
Later that day, the first man, noticing the scowl still on his friends' face, said "Friend, what is wrong?"
The second man said "You picked up that woman and carried her across the stream."
"Yes, but I put her down hours ago. Why are you still carrying her around?"
You have enough carrying your own burdens.
An anonymous reader writes to share the findings of a recent transatlantic survey which suggests that the recession is pushing workers to be a little bit more accommodating when it comes to sharing, viewing, or stealing sensitive information from the company they work(ed) for.
Gee, I wonder where people learned their ethics from?
Seriously? Why do they expect that line level workers shouldn't act like crooks when it's standard practice for executives? Step back from this article title and realize that crooked executives caused the recession and it makes perfect sense.
"E Pluribus Unix"
When a music/video piracy article pops up here it seems like somebody always points out that copyright infringement isn't theft. Nobody is being deprived of something, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, you know the arguments.
It seems like there's no stealing or theft involved here either; it's just a copy and nobody is being deprived of anything. Don't recall anybody pointing that out before in this context.
Case A) Copying bits, but it's not theft it's copyright infringement.
Case B) Copying bits, but it *is* theft.
It would seem that there might be a distinction, and I'm curious where people draw the line.
I work for a large company that gets mentioned on Slashdot every now and again. We're a tech company that sells hardware solutions running propietary software. It is REQUIRED by my manager that I carry proprietary tools and full source code on my laptop. Of course it's encrypted, but my laptop contains everything that a competitor would need to take us out of business.
In the event that I would get fired or laid off, my NDA and non-compete become null and void. Therefore, it's in my best interest to make off-site backups. I've seen my company screw over people with no regret. Should I end up in that situation, I want to COVER MY ASS. So guess what, I have a full copy of company secrets, engineering docs, and source code should my employer decide to end my contract.
Now, I will be clear here, I fully intend to honor my NDA and non-compete. As long as my company honors my contract, I will do the same. There is no clause about keeping copies of company secrets in my house, as long as they are encrypted. If I terminate my employment, I am legally bound to destroy all copies, and I will honor that. If my company decides to mercilessly let me go to "restructure" or "right-size" or "realign" the company, they nullify the contract, get the finger, and their closest competitor gets me and all the company secrets I hold.
This may sound harsh, but so does letting people go because the greedy bastards want to increase their stock price. Fair is fair.
Some of us like to work for reasons beyond simple money.
Perhaps you made the wrong job choice, my sympathies.
It's never to late to find something you like to do (accepting financial reality.)
Who knows: If you like it you might even be good at it?
Or perhaps you are just fucking lazy.
I would go stir crazy without something useful to do.
If I were independently wealthy I would have to construct a job like activity to keep me busy. Perhaps 'making a small fortune in auto racing'? Bet I would work _more and harder_ doing that.
That said I prefer to spend my time 'solving technical puzzles/problems, usually with computers', not playing office politics with a bunch of morons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Very interesting, thanks for that.
In some other thread here on /. that I ran across earlier today, someone else had posted this link, which I found very interesting as well:
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/Introduction_links.pdf
That's just the intro, but if you find it holds your attention, the full article / online book is available from the parent directory.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Nicely put. :-P
Though I'm repeating myself from elsewhere in this thread, some other poster in a completely different Slashdot thread linked through to this introduction to a serious study of authoritarianism -- not so much as a governmental style, but rather as a social and emotional construct. Since we're talking about rotting from the head down, it might make sense to look at the head... :) If the intro linked here holds your interest, the whole online book is available from the parent directory.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
One of my friends and co-workers recently discovered social security numbers and pay rates for seemingly every employee in the country on a network share. This looked to be something like a human resource network share. He told a supervisor who told one of the operations managers.
They then fired the him and the supervisor. Then they gave him my paycheck. He didn't look at it until he got home as he gets a stub. Both co-worker and supervisor were really great people. The people in charge played a nice game of "cover your ass" and "firing people = problem solved."
I was also thinking about computer programs. Which programmer will not save some source code examples?
>> You do whatever you need to do and whenever you need to do "it".
Is this a typical European mentaility? If so that is pretty sad employee payback to what sounds like some very accomidating employers.
US unemployment is far lower in technology regions. 11% in the rust belt, sure I believe it. In the DC suburbs (for example).... far lower (I amnot bothering to Google the result.) I would be right now the unemployment rate in that area is on par with nonrecession Europe.
I don't think the choice to steal or not to steal is caused by the recession. At a job I once worked, it became very clear to me that, "It is tremendously harder to walk in integrity than to grab for what isn't yours." I walked the difficult - the VERY difficult walk. I grew stronger by making that choice. I am glad - VERY glad, I did not compromise. Quote above is mine. I am Susan Lois Metler Henry and you may quote me.
... for Sweeney Todd. Good luck with all that!