Both Sides of the Coin: Employment Separation
This article was posted as original content on the ACEDS Blog and written by Gavin W. Manes.
Employee separation commonly involves investigations, litigation, and eDiscovery. Many employees continue to access information from their employers after separation and almost ¾ of employers report that they’ve been negatively impacted by an employee breaching their digital security.
Many employees also keep passwords, either their own or others, which they can use to take data or monitor activity after their departure. This is a frightening prospect for employers, to be sure, who must also consider the potential for data exfiltration through accounts on third party platforms (such as Salesforce).
Data theft is rife and the vectors of stealing data are numerous, but this doesn’t mean the people that left the company are bad. In fact, as we discuss below, there are times when the removal of data was unintentional, and times when the removed data doesn’t result in easily quantifiable damages. Often there’s some analogies to a domestic relations case in the sense of betrayal, anger, and resentment on all sides.