How has cyber technology created opportunities for workplace deviance?
Workplace deviance is defined by Wikipedia as the “intentional desire to cause harm to an organization or more specifically a workplace.” This can also be referred to insider threat, which is defined by Wikipedia as “a malicious threat to an organization that comes from people within the organization.” With cyber technology advancing, the competition between companies also increases. This births a motive for a person or multiple people to explicitly join a company for malicious personal or monetary gain. In relations to cyber technology, there are countless examples of employees who use their position as part of a cybersecurity team to steal company information for alternate use. They abuse company trust that lets them have access to sensitive files with the benefit of the doubt. An example of this occurred in 2019 when a man who worked for General Electric was downloading company files onto a flash drive. He got caught but he was let off with a warning after claiming that the files were deleted. Once flash drives were banned by the company altogether, he used Steganography to hide the files and was able to send them to a partner oversees. Steganography is defined by TechTarget as “the technique of hiding secret data within an ordinary, non-secret, file or message in order to avoid detection.” The men were using the files for companies they supported in China. These men’s names are Zhaoxi Zhang and Xiaoqing Zheng. Eventually Zheng was caught and charged. Without the advancement of cyber technology events like these would not happen as often as they do. It can be as simple as joining a company’s cybersecurity team that gives them the ability to do this. Other advancements besides Steganography include developed forms of phishing, data leaks, and more that allow workplace deviance to sometimes go unnoticed.
source:
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/infosec/ge-engineer-charged-data-theft-1/