Disgruntled Employees Research Articles

The prince of insiders: a multiple pathway approach to understanding IP theft insider attacks

Purpose Intellectual property (IP) theft is an increasing threat that can lead to large financial losses and reputational harm. These attacks are typically noticed only after the IP is stolen, which is usually too late. This paper aims to investigate the psychological profile and the socio-technical events that statistically predict the likelihood of an IP threat. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyses 86 IP theft cases found in court documents. Two novel analyses are conducted. The research uses LLMs to analyse the personality of these insiders, which is followed by an investigation of the pathways to the attack using behaviour sequence analysis (BSA). Findings These IP theft insiders scored significantly higher on measures of Machiavellianism compared to the normal population. Socio-technical variables, including IP theft via photographs, travelling overseas, approaching multiple organisations and delivering presentations, were identified. Contrary to previous assumptions that there is a single pathway to an attack, the authors found that multiple, complex pathways lead to an attack (sometimes multiple attacks). This work, therefore, provides a new framework for considering critical pathways to insider attacks. Practical implications These findings reveal that IP theft insiders may come across as charming, star employees rather than the stereotype of disgruntled employees. Moreover, organisations’ policies may need to consider that IP theft occurs via non-linear and multiple pathways. This means that sequences of events need to be considered in detecting these attacks instead of anomalies outright. The authors also argue that there may be a case for “continuous evaluation” to detect insider activity. Originality/value This paper offers a new framework for understanding and studying insider threats. Instead of a single critical pathway, this work demonstrates the need to consider multiple interconnected pathways. It elucidates the importance of a multidisciplinary approach and provides opportunities to reconsider current practices in detection and prevention.

The “nicest place on the Internet”? Trouble at Pinterest, Inc

Research methodology Data for the case came from public sources, including legal proceedings, court filings and Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The authors perused hundreds of court documents and identified 28 that were most relevant to this case. The authors also used press interviews with the women highlighted in the case. The authors have no relationship with the company and no one from the company has reviewed the information presented in this case. As the case is drawn from sworn legal testimonies, interviews and related documents in the public domain, the authors did not have to seek approval for publication. Case overview/synopsis Pinterest touted itself as “the nicest place on the Internet.” It had an almost 80% female user base and purported to have an inclusive culture that embraced diversity. However, in June 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, two former female employees of color violated their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to publicly accuse Pinterest of racial and gender discrimination. In August 2020, Pinterest’s former Chief Operating Officer, Francoise Brougher, filed a lawsuit charging the company with gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination, and authored a public blog post titled, The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity, detailing her own experience with the company’s discriminatory culture. Three days later 236 of Pinterest’s 2,545 employees staged a virtual walkout and 445 employees signed a petition in an attempt to change Pinterest’s policies and culture. The case provides a brief overview of Pinterest, including its mission, values and organizational culture, and details several incidents and complaints by female and minority employees. The case questions whether employee complaints are a relatively narrow issue involving disgruntled former employees who did not fit at the organization or a much broader issue involving discrimination and managerial neglect in creating and maintaining a nondiscriminatory, inclusive culture. Students are encouraged to evaluate the situation in which Co-Founder, Board Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Ben Silbermann finds himself, evaluate the actions taken and decide if Silbermann should take any additional actions to address the discrimination claims and ensure a positive culture for all employees. Complexity academic level This case is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate level courses in organizational behavior, human resource management and business law or any course where discrimination and workplace culture are discussed.

Digital Technology and Public Relations Practice in Nigeria: A Critical Discourse

This work critically examined the impact of digital technology on public relations practice in Nigeria. The objectives of the study were to examine the role of digital technology on public relations practice in Nigeria, identify types of digital technology and examine the positive and negative impacts of digital technology on public relations practices. The study made use of qualitative research methods which relied on books, journals, internet sources, review of related literature to critically discourse the impact of digital media on public relation practice. The study which was anchored on uses and gasification theory and technology determinism theory revealed that the advent of digital technology has greatly impacted how public relations has been practised in Nigeria. The study concluded that digital technology has transformed modern life by adding immeasurable benefits to it. The study recommended that to maintain a favourable image in the organization, public relations practitioners should maintain absolute control over this new media technology and continually monitor the web for unwanted online exposure. Furthermore, inadequate and erroneous online information broadcast by disgruntled employees, customers, and stakeholders should be promptly addressed by PR experts in organizations to avoid unfriendly relations with the public.

Search and CompAre Reverse (SCAR): A Bioinformatics–Inspired Methodology for Detecting File Remnants in Digital Forensics

A storage device may contain data that an individual is legally or morally not allowed to possess. Or, a disgruntled company employee may intentionally destroy corporate files, assuming once deleted the information is lost forever. The data could take the form of a database owned by a competitor, illegal images, or videos, or trade secrets or confidential business information. Fragments of the data may very well still be present on the disk drive, for example, and forensic tools may be capable of recovering some of the confidential information. This paper introduces Search and CompAre Reverse (SCAR), inspired from tools used in the bioinformatics community. The contribution is an initial empirical investigation into the use of this bioinformatics-inspired approach to deduce the partial existence of patterns in cases where traditional digital forensics tools cannot detect the type of the file due to overwriting the file signature portion of the file.

Detecting Insider Threat through Psychometric Scores and Work Environment

Nowadays the cyber-threat is looming large from disgruntled employees rather than external attackers. With the advent of modern threat models which help in development of adversary attack scenarios, the security designers can get an idea of attack mitigation strategies. The analysis of threat model helps in knowing the unforeseen circumstances which can lead to a cyber-security risk. If the weakness in the network or in any other element of a cyber-ecosystem is identified during the design of security models, then eventually it will lead to stronger security applications. This paper formulates a framework of identification of insider threat which may be a result of various factors in an organization. The proposed technique considers psychometric condition of an employee along with other factors which may give rise as a threat to the organization. The dataset has been used to train the model and the experimental results have found an effective way to detect the insider threat in specific cases.

From the Chair

From the Chair

Whistleblowing: procedural and dogmatic problems in the implementation of directive (EU) 2019/1937

PurposeThis paper aims to enlighten the shortcomings of the EU Whistleblowing Directive 2019/1973, which could interfere negatively with its successful national implementation. In focus is the tension between companies potentially attempting to hide misconduct and disgruntled employees taking advantage of generous protection under the directive.Design/methodology/approachWith an extensive literary basis, this paper explores articles of the EU Whistleblowing Directive 2019/1973 under five areas of the so-called “weakness.” With view to Germany and Austria, the difficulty of implementing the directive is highlighted and likewise with view to Switzerland, a potential solution is presented.FindingsThe Whistleblowing Directive 2019/1973 overshoots its target by protecting whistleblowers without considering the wider public interest. There are specific points of arbitrary definition which demand resolution to ensure a successful national implementation.Originality/valueThis is a multifaceted discussion of a highly contentious ethical debate. Through an exploration of specific points of the Directive, it is possible to present why there are points of contention in the first place, and also the difficulty of implementing the principle of proportionality. The issue at the heart of the matter is balancing the protection of trade secrets with the fundamental necessity of whistleblowing as a means of last resort.

A Comparative Synthesis of American and Korean Parricidal Mass Murders

Contemporary studies of mass murder have examined attacks carried out by current or former students in educational settings or disgruntled employees at former places of work. Recently conceptualized as “active shooter events,” this type of public mass killing has eclipsed the most pervasive one throughout the twentieth century: mass killings within the family. The dearth of scholarly work on mass killings in the context of parricides in other national and cultural contexts is notable given the salience of family killings in the homicide literature. Using previously published findings on parricides in nineteenth-century America and twentieth-century Korea, this paper provides a comparative synthesis of parricidal mass murders—mass killings that occur during the course of parricides. Notable points of convergence and divergence are discussed relative to culture and offense characteristics.

In retrospect – my life in food

In retrospect – my life in food

Do Bureaucrats Contribute to the Resource Curse? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in New Oil States

The resource curse literature argues that oil production reshapes the fiscal contract between citizens and the state: politicians become less responsive to citizen taxpayers and more likely to use public revenues for their own benefit. This paper examines whether and how bureaucrats influence this breakdown of the fiscal contract. Analysing results of a survey experiment conducted with government employees in Ghana and Uganda, we find that, when primed to think about oil revenue, bureaucrats do not generally express attitudes indicating that they contribute to the resource curse. Although oil revenue does lead some Ghanaian bureaucrats to become less interested in responding to taxpayers, this finding does not operate as predicted, i.e. by bureaucrats expressing greater partiality towards the ruling elite. Instead, we attribute this outcome to ‘disgruntled employees’ – political outsiders with low salaries – who, unlikely to benefit from oil revenue, become disaffected from citizen service. The results shed new light on processes through which resource extraction changes state institutions.

Cybercrime, cybersecurity and water utilities

ABSTRACT A total of 20 known cases of cybercrime attacks on water utilities have been seen in five countries between 2000 and 2021, with a steady increase in their frequency. The actual number of cyberattacks is higher, with 40 recorded in the United States in 2014–15. It is chiefly driven by organized crime and hostile state actors, along with disgruntled former employees. Vulnerabilities occur because of utilities adopting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems without appropriate cybersecurity measures along with staff who have properly trained to be aware of phishing attacks. Threats such as these highlight the need for water utilities to have a comprehensive risk management system in operation.

A smart building security system with intelligent face detection and recognition

The security system is the most important application that protects several threats from inside and outside of an organization. The purposes of several security building applications such as the system will know criminals, disgruntled former employees enter the workplace, and enabling building security to work proactively for ensuring that associates and customers are safe from harm. By implementing face detection and recognition of the security system, video surveillance in the building can be improved by upgrading the system of video surveillance with artificial intelligence. The aim of the research is to develop the face detection and recognition in the security system in the building with recognizing human faces and image capture to the cloud storage. The result shows that the video will stream and recognize human faces whether the person is authorized or unauthorized in the system image using Raspberry Pi 3. For analysis purpose, the image captured and stored from the two type of cloud storage namely Cloudinary and Dropbox had been analyzed. Based on the analysis, the image captured and stored into Dropbox cloud storage give the best performance features which gained more 75% of quality images.

How Some Lawyers Prioritise Earnings and Not Necessarily the Best Interests of Their Clients

This case deals with an employee seeking justice in a labour dispute and who ends up paying a small fortune in legal fees and still fails to find satisfaction. The case provides food for thought for human resource practitioners and particularly lawyers regarding under the circumstances when they should be ethically bound to advise disgruntled employees to cease pursuing a grievance that has little prospect of success. How and when should the human resource practitioner provide professional and independent advice, and when should the ethical (sic) lawyer refuse to approach the courts with a case containing insufficient merit?

Physician Who Blew Whistle on Administration Response to COVID Honored

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ProfessionalFull AccessPhysician Who Blew Whistle on Administration Response to COVID HonoredMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:25 Nov 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.11b19AbstractIt is not the first time a physician has been honored with the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize—one of last year’s winners was child psychiatrist Pamela McPherson, M.D., who spoke out against the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border.“Of all the tools to fight this pandemic, the one most sorely missing is the truth,” says Rick A. Bright, M.D.Rick A. Bright, M.D., an immunologist and former official in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), received the 2020 Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize for publicizing what Bright said was the Trump administration’s suppression of truth about the COVID-19 virus and politicization of the administration’s response to the pandemic.“In January we saw a deadly virus spreading from person to person in several countries before it became widespread in the U.S.,” Bright said in an acceptance speech at the virtual Ridenhour Awards last month. “We all knew the risk of the pending global crisis; the president knew. Yet the administration failed to prioritize actions critical to get in front of the outbreak. Americans were not told the truth about the virus. Instead the president and the White House [Coronoavirus] Task Force said the risk was low and the virus would just disappear.”The Ridenhour Awards—sponsored by Type Media Center, the Fertel Foundation, and the Stewart R. Mott Foundation—were founded in 2003 in memory of Ron Ridenhour, the Vietnam War veteran who exposed the massacre at My Lai to Congress. The awards honor people “who persevere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice, or illuminate a more just vision of society.”Last year child psychiatrist and APA member Pamela McPherson, M.D., received a Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize for exposing the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S. southern border (see Psychiatric News).In 2018 Bright was appointed by then-President Barack Obama to be director of the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority (BARDA), where he had worked since joining HHS in 2010.In April, in the midst of the pandemic, Bright was reassigned to work at the National Institutes of Health. Bright said that the move was a demotion in retaliation for his opposition to certain Trump administration policies—especially the attempt by the administration to speed approval of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.“I found myself in the crosshairs between science and politics,” Bright said. “In March, the White House ordered me to drop everything to make chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine available to all Americans. There was no evidence that either drug was effective in treating people with COVID-19. Even worse, the drugs in question came from factories in Pakistan and India that lacked FDA approval.“Nevertheless, the FDA was instructed to make an exception, and I was given 48 hours to enable widespread access. The timeline was driven to align with the president’s plan to promote these unproven drugs at a news conference.”Bright said his team sought to evade the directive for widespread access and instead worked with the FDA on an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to restrict the use of drugs to hospitalized patients under close supervision. Later, the FDA withdrew the EUA, and studies have since shown that hydroxychloroquine has no significant benefit for COVID-19.In May, Bright filed a whistleblower complaint against HHS. The HHS Office of Special Counsel, which investigates such complaints, ruled that the administration had violated the Whistleblower Protection Act and called on the administration to reappoint Bright to his position at BARDA. The rule was not binding on HHS, and he was never reappointed. President Trump dismissed Bright as a “disgruntled employee” in a tweet.In testimony before the House Health Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Bright warned that “the darkest winter in human history” could come in 2020 if steps were not taken to control the pandemic. Last month, Bright resigned from HHS.“Of all the tools to fight this pandemic, the one most sorely missing has been the truth,” Bright said at the Ridenhour ceremony. “Truth is the only way to build trust and instill calm in a crisis.” He concluded his remarks saying, “This pandemic is not over, and the worst is yet to come.” ■A video of the Ridenhour Prizes is posted here. ISSUES NewArchived

The Influence on Resale Prices of Labor– Management Disputes in Aircraft Manufacturing .

Aircraft are manufactured with unusual attention to quality control. The.product common in this industry limits the potential for Lordstown-style disgruntled employee sabotage documented in the auto industry. A loose bolt that rattles inside an automobile’s door frame is of a different magnitude than one that threatens the integrity of an aircraft. On top of the incentives to build quality in, aircraft are manufactured under multiple overlapping levels of quality control: by the manufacturer, by the buyer, and by the Federal Aviation Administration. This oversight extends from design to parts to assembly to maintenance. Both the market incentives and the extensive regulatory oversight limit the scope for labor disputes to affect quality.

Discovering “Insider IT Sabotage” based on human behaviour

PurposeMalicious activities conducted by disgruntled employees via an email platform can cause profound damage to an organization such as financial and reputational losses. This threat is known as an “Insider IT Sabotage” threat. This involves employees misusing their access rights to harm the organization. Events leading up to the attack are not technical but rather behavioural. The problem is that owing to the high volume and complexity of emails, the risk of insider IT sabotage cannot be diminished with rule-based approaches.Design/methodology/approachMalicious human behaviours that insiders within the insider IT sabotage category would possess are studied and mapped to phrases that would appear in email communications. A large email data set is classified according to behavioural characteristics of these employees. Machine learning algorithms are used to identify occurrences of this insider threat type. The accuracy of these approaches is measured.FindingsIt is shown in this paper that suspicious behaviour of disgruntled employees can be discovered, by means of machine intelligence techniques. The output of the machine learning classifier depends mainly on the depth and quality of the phrases and behaviour analysis, cleansing and number of email attributes examined. This process of labelling content in isolation could be improved if other attributes of the email data are included, such that a confidence score can be computed for each user.Originality/valueThis research presents a novel approach to show that the creation of a prototype that can automate the detection of insider IT sabotage within email systems to mitigate the risk within organizations.

NLRB Gives Employers More Latitude on Severance Agreements

Severance agreements can serve many purposes. An employer can rid itself of a problem employee. A potential lawsuit can be settled and released. Most often, severance agreements involve a common component—a disgruntled employee. Many union organizing drives start with one or more workers who are displeased with their employer. Can severance agreements be effective as part of a union‐avoidance strategy? In short, the answer is “yes.”

Alternative Dispute Resolution: What Employers Need to Know

Invariably, some employees will have work‐related concerns and issues. Ideally, an employer will have mechanisms in place—such as open‐door policies, educated front‐line supervisors, and proactive human resources personnel—to address those concerns. Most times, an employer will be able to resolve concerns with these resources. However, there are occasions when such concerns cannot be resolved through these informal means. A disgruntled employee can turn to outsiders, such as government agencies, lawyers, or unions, for assistance.

Former Employees' Negative Online Comments Are Unprotected Under the Act

Many employers have had the problem of disgruntled former employees posting negative online comments about the company. The same problem arises with current workers who have an axe to grind against their employer. Such complaints give rise to questions of whether they are protected by federal labor law. For example, employees banding together on Facebook or Instagram to gain support for their grievances or enlist public support for their opposition to employer practices are regularly granted the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. However, General Counsel of the National Labor Relation's Board recently opined that such protection is not unlimited.

Conceptualising talent in multinational hotel corporations

PurposeTo identify, develop and retain talent, an important first step is to ensure that key stakeholders in the talent management (TM) process have a shared view of what is meant by talent within the organisation. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how talent is defined in the context of the hospitality industry and to examine the degree of (mis)alignment among corporate and business unit leaders.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a qualitative approach consisting of 73 interviews with stakeholders at corporate and business unit levels in three multinational hotel corporations. In addition, documents were collected and analysed to support the interview data.FindingsEach organisation had a formal approach to conceptualising talent at a corporate level. Both inclusive and exclusive views on talent as well as a broad set of characteristics that make up talent were reported with the importance of organisational values being prominent. However, despite formal global policies being in place, considerable divergence in practice was found across organisational levels.Practical implicationsA lack of clarity on what talent means in an organisational setting may lead to an inconsistent talent identification process which may lead to negative perceptions of fairness among employees. This may, in turn, bring about disgruntled employees and increased turnover.Originality/valueThis paper provides empirical evidence to the limited body of knowledge on the conceptualisation of talent. The display of organisational values emerged as important to being labelled talent, a factor that has received scant consideration in the literature.