1.4 Employee Sabotage

Probably the easiest form of employee sabotage known to all system administrators would be "accidental" spillage. The act of intentionally spilling coffee or soda on a keyboard to make the computer unusable for some time is a criminal offense. Proving the spillage was deliberate , however, is next to impossible without the aid of hidden cameras or other surveillance techniques. Some administrators have even experienced severe cases where servers have been turned off over a weekend , resulting in unavailability, data loss, and the incurred, but needless cost, of hours of troubleshooting by someone. Employees are the people who are most familiar with their employer's computers and applications. They know what actions can cause damage, mischief, or sabotage. The number of incidents of employee sabotage is believed to be much smaller than the instances of theft, but the cost of such incidents can be quite high. [14]

As long as people feel unjustly treated, cheated, bored, harassed, endangered, or betrayed at work, sabotage will be used as a method to achieve revenge or a twisted sense of job satisfaction. Later in this book, we show how serious sabotage acts can be prevented by implementing methods of strict access control.