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From: Sid Shniad
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Workplace sabotage on the rise as job security wanes
Date: Wednesday, January 27, 1999 4:24PM
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES October 31, 1998
SURE, WORKERS GET MAD BUT MORE GET EVEN
Sabotage Is on the Rise As Job Security Wanes
By Mary Curtius
SAN FRANCISCO -- Call it work rage. As the corporate world
slims down, speeds up and grows more uncertain, workers are
getting mad. Anger at employers is getting more pervasive,
security experts say, in a job market where few people expect to
finish a career where they began it.
Resentment usually surfaces in the traditional form of griping. But
increasingly, it is playing itself out in a darker fashion -- sabotage.
Most managers don't want to even talk about their workers who
deliberately inflict damage on the job. Few companies have worked
out programs to anticipate and deal with the problem. But
employee sabotage is costing American corporations hundreds of
millions, if not billions, dollars every year, and it is being carried
out by everyone from dock workers to corporate vice presidents.
Just ask Dennis Dalton, president of security firm Dalton Affiliates
in Fremont, Calif.
Hired recently to find out who was carving graffiti into the
imported hardwood that lined one of San Francisco's best-known
downtown skyscrapers, Dalton set up security cameras in the
elevators and posted signs outside warning riders they were being
monitored.
The security consultant, a veteran of the business, could hardly
believe what the videotapes recorded. Vandals repeatedly gouged
profanity-laden hate messages into the wood, forcing the office
tower's owners to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars replacing
paneling.
Both the building's owners and Dalton initially believed they were
looking for outsiders, people who did not actually work in the
building.
"There were a group of bicycle messenger folks that we strongly
suspected were the primary people," Dalton recalls. Instead, "we
caught office workers using pocket knives and other instruments
on the wood," he says. "It ran across the spectrum . . . to our
chagrin and surprise, up popped a professional white-collar
employee." All but two of the many vandals the cameras recorded,
he says, were employed by firms whose offices were in the
skyscraper.
Companies Find the Enemy Within
In another instance, Dalton says, owners of a Boston high-rise
wanted him to find out who was defacing elevators lined with
imported marble.
"Again, we put in cameras, this time hidden -- with a court order.
We found that the vandals were dock workers, secretarial-
computer people, computer workers. And then we caught a vice
president who wrote graffiti on the elevator's marble in response to
the nasty messages from the employees. At that point, you think
'This is getting bizarre."'
The lesson to be learned, Dalton says, is one a lot of managers have
trouble accepting: Employee sabotage in the workplace is a
common occurrence and can range from the most simple acts of
vandalism to complex acts of technological revenge.
Employee sabotage, particularly in the Information Age, "is a huge
issue," says Barbara J. Bashein, professor of information systems at
California State University at San Marcos.
A specialist in computer systems and controls, Bashein wrote a
report this year for the Financial Executives Research Foundation
on internal corporation controls over technology. One of the things
she learned, Bashein says, "is that a lot of managers believe
employee sabotage won't happen to them. Our research showed
that the reality is that it will happen to you because it happens to
most organizations."
It can be as simple as the angry employee who uses his car key to
scrape paint off a row of cars in the company parking lot, security
specialist Dalton says, or as complex as the computer technician
who plants a virus in the company's system as her final act before
taking a new job.
In San Francisco a year ago, a power failure at a key downtown
substation of the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. plunged one-third of
the city into darkness for several hours and hopelessly snarled the
morning rush-hour commute. Within hours of the blackout, PG&E
and local law enforcement officials were declaring it an act of
sabotage -- someone had turned a long row of knobs in the
substation to cut the power.
At the time, PG&E was struggling with the adjustments caused
deregulation of utilities in California. Employees who had long
counted on job security were suddenly faced with the realities --
and stresses -- caused by jumping into a competitive market.
>From the beginning, both PG&E al law enforcement officials said
employees were the primary suspects because access to the
substation was restricted and no one had broken in. The FBI says
is still under investigation. No arrests have been made.
Often, acts of employee sabotage go unreported and unpunished,
according to Richard Power, a spokesman for Computer Security
Institute in San Francisco. The institute is an association of
information security specialists with 5,000 members worldwide,
Power says.
"It happens far more times than you read about in the newspaper,"
Power says. "Any computer crime is very rarely reported because
companies don't want the publicity. They don't want to draw
attention to the vulnerability of their networks -- they don't want to
alarm stockholders."
At PG&E, officials say they are frustrated by the fact that no one
has been arrested in the substation case, but they add that
employee sabotage is low on their list of security concerns.
"The last incident of the type that occurred at the substation
occurred 15 years ago," says Lyman Shaffer, head of corporate
security for PG&E. "We don't regard sabotage as a serious issue at
our company."
But Power says such crimes are growing more common -- and
potentially more costly to companies -- as reliance on
interconnected computer systems grows.
"The more and more our systems are networked and businesses rely
on online communications, the more of a problem sabotage
becomes," he says.
One of the largest known instances of employee computer sabotage
in this country was uncovered just this year, at Omega
Engineering, a New Jersey company.
Timothy A. Lloyd is expected to stand trial by the end of this year,
charged with planting a computer "bomb" that deleted software
essential to Omega's operations.
Federal prosecutors have estimated the sabotage cost Omega more
than $10 million in sales and contracts. Lloyd had been a
programmer at the company who lost his job. He is charged with
deliberately destroying his companies computer files.
Job Insecurity Shakes Workplace
In its 1997-98 Intellectual Property Loss Special Report, the
American Society for Industrial Security said 89% of respondents
to its survey said their biggest concern about system security was
retaliation from disgruntled employees.
Entire security industries are being spawned by the growing fear of
employee sabotage, says Dalton, the security specialist. But he says
that he and other security firms tell corporations that increased
security alone cannot prevent such acts.
"I've been in this business for 30 years, and there is far more
employee sabotage now than there was even 20 years ago," Dalton
says. "Regardless of what you might read in management
textbooks, there is a correlation between the level of corporate
disenchantment between employees and their bosses and the
willingness to commit sabotage."
As company mergers and downsizing have become commonplace
and job security rare, Dalton says, instances of employee sabotage
have multiplied.
"When I do strategic planning for corporations," Dalton says, "one
of the chief things we look at is how to develop sound employee
relationship programs -- how to announce layoffs, acquisitions or
mergers, how to tell people you'll be closing a plant or relocating
it. We call it asset protection from a prevention standpoint."
