Non-Disclosure of Employer Information
The IT employee shall not be permitted to
disclose proprietary information related to his or her employer,
except by prior employer approval that is obtained in written
form. Company information is a valuable asset which must be
protected from unscrupulous employees and other external
business threats.
Sensitive Information
In a large corporation, the IT support
personnel had access to just about any company information
imaginable, as is usually the case, and they were entrusted with
maintaining its confidentiality.
One example of an IT employee taking
advantage of this trust involved a company that was one day away
from announcing which employees would be included in a planned
layoff. One of the IT support personnel in the mail exchange
department accessed the stored list of employees to be laid off.
For whatever reason, this individual decided to email some of
his friends that were on the list, telling them about their
impending layoff. Of course these employees were upset and
started raising complaints with their managers.
The leak was traced back to the violator,
who was promptly fired. He was not on the layoff list. As
events unraveled, this would have been better for him since by
being fired, he did not even receive severance pay
. He was escorted off company property and followed home by his
manager, who retrieved the personal computer that the company
had provided.
