The enemy within

EMPLOYEES are often said to be a company’s biggest resource. It is equally true that they are its biggest liability. Scarcely a week goes by without a company falling victim to employees-turned-enemies-or-embarrassments. On July 20th Ashley Madison, a website for married people looking to have an affair, announced that it had been hacked. Noel Biderman, the company’s chief executive, says that he thinks the attack was “an inside job”. On July 6th HSBC fired a group of employees when it emerged that they had filmed themselves engaged in an “ISIS-style mock beheading” of an Asian colleague dressed in an orange jumpsuit.

The most familiar type of enemy within is the fraudster. The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister organisation of The Economist, conducts a regular poll of senior executives on the subject of fraud committed by insiders. In 2013 the poll discovered that about 70% of companies had suffered from at least one instance of fraud, up from 61% in the previous survey. Fraud is often petty: a survey of British employees for YouGov in 2010 found that a quarter of staff eligible for expenses admitted to inflating claims....

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1OzPKqm