How has cyber technology created opportunities for workplace deviance?

Cyber technology has created opportunities for workplace deviance in many ways.  First, we can consider the cybersecurity triad, Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accessibility.  An employee wishing to engage in deviant, or destructive behavior can affect all of those parameters in a few ways.

 Let’s consider confidentiality, a deviant employee could expose, copy, or send a file or document with ease based on todays interconnected devices like tablets and smart phones.  This type of attack could be done from their workstation at the user level or could be completed by a smartphone camera connected to a cellular network.  A photo of sensitive data could be much harder to track down than a copied file. 

Additionally, the integrity of a file, computer system, or network could easily be compromised by a user distorting, deleting, or creating files or information.  A competent user may be able to access the computer networks from home with some effort, or a company may be involved in creating work from home systems for their employees. If an employee decides to distort the integrity of the data, he has access to, an organizations main defense is managerial auditing of workplace tasks and also the controlled permissions a user is given when they sign up and are onboarded as a user of a network.

Lastly, accessibility of information can be affected by cyber technology in a few ways.  First a disgruntled employee can obviously physically damage devices, resources, and networks.  A deviant employee could purposely sabotage the organization to prevent accessing software or data resources.  Particularly capable employees may be able to use software attacks to remove accessibility, the most famous of which is a Denial of Service attack or DOS attack, where an attacker tries to make a resource on a network unavailable by disrupting the services of a host connected to the internet.

 Adding to all this cyber technology which can connect us all to each other can be used to create workplace problems like bullying, cliques, gossip, and parallel authority structures. New technology can also become a distraction at work as user computers are used inappropriately for entertainment, web browsing, online dating, or online shopping.