Security News > 2021 > April > Concerns grow over digital threats faced from former employees
An unfortunate byproduct of the employee turnover is the cybersecurity threat that comes with having a significant number of former employees.
"A lot of companies fail to have clear policies or a checklist that employers use for post-employee separation. This is extremely important because failing to do so is going to involve a lot of things but the most important thing is that you want to make sure that the former employee or even a subcontractor that previously had access to the organization's technologies and systems is completely locked out," Guccione said in an interview.
"It's going to avoid the risk of business disruption. It's going to avoid the risk of the leakage of intellectual property or trade secrets. It also mitigates legal risk because what you don't want is any exposure of or unauthorized access to sensitive data about the organization or its stakeholders. If a door is left open to a former member of the team and that person is disgruntled, you could have a real problem on your hands."
There have been multiple instances in the tech world where former employees have accessed systems and done significant damage.
A Justice Department statement said the actions of Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, who had resigned three months before the hack, led to over 16,000 Webex Teams accounts being shut down for up to two weeks and caused Cisco to spend approximately $1.4 million in employee time to restore the damage to the application and refund over $1 million to affected customers.
Axiad COO Jerome Becquart added that some studies have shown that at least 10% of employees access their former company's data after leaving the company.