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Young Employees Pose Increasing Risk to Networks
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Monday March 17, @11:42AM
from the also-increased-chance-of-lohan dept.
from the also-increased-chance-of-lohan dept.
buzzardsbay writes "Baseline is reporting on an upcoming survey from Symantec and Applied Research-West that confirms many suspicions about the generation gap in the workplace, namely that younger workers will use your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on. Dubbed "Millenials," these workers born after 1980 are nearly twice as likely to use cell phones and PDAs at work, and half admit to installing unauthorized software on their employer's computers. On the upside, the Millenials are more security aware than their older co-workers."
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Gen Y Workers Reinventing IT for the Better 440 comments
buzzardsbay writes "We all know the complaints about young employees. They depend too much on their parents' money, they need constant hand-holding, they have no job loyalty, they demand more than they're worth, they disrespect older employees, and they're naive about corporate culture. But despite this conventional wisdom, there's growing evidence that the different working styles of Gen Y workers might be causing fundamental — and beneficial — changes in the way enterprises run, especially when it comes to IT. For example, they may show better judgment when making tech purchases and are often better with green IT initiatives. This is a nice counterpoint to a previous story (and resulting incendiary comments) that dubbed young tech workers a risk to corporate networks."
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they need to protect their networks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they need to protect their networks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:they need to protect their networks (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also about educating the employees more than anything IT can do to protect the network. If I can call one of your employees and pretend to be the remote helpdesk, and say that I need your password so I can install some software on your computer, and they give me the password, I am in your network.
It's called social engineering, and if you are good at it, you can get past ANY network or software based systems.
Re:they need to protect their networks (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Do it but don't admit it
- Or don't it but are way less productive than their peers
I don't know how it is for the rest of the slashdot crowd but almost everywhere I've worked it's impossible to be (decently) productive using only authorized software.
The sad thing is not a matter of cost, but a matter of paperwork. Something as basic as winrar (no, let's not go into why would I want to use winanything) is impossible to get by the official channels.
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of "unauthorized software" are things like chat clients, media players, RSS/Weather update notifiers, games and software for personal devices (iTunes etc).
=Smidge=
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Funny)
They?
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck with your job.
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
At my work, the things I install "unauthorized" for myself and my coworkers which are 100% productivity:
Firefox
Phrase Express (text macro program)
Stardock
Microsoft Powertools/toys (the one that gives you a screenshot of each app when you alt+tab).
None are "approved" but all the techs approve of it, because they know better.
None of them use any of what you mentioned. No RSS readers, no games, no funky screensavers, no weather spyware shit. Work is laid back enough to not care (many people just browse the web all day, I mean cmon I'm replying on slashdot), but most people don't push the slacking that far. Also, we're an enormous multibillion $ nonprofit corporation and what I am telling you is like...hmm, well its a worldwide company with thousands of employees. I've talked to the CEO and even he has admitted to having a preference for firefox over IE for example, even though the CIO hasn't officially or formally approved it.
I don't mean it to be ad hominem on this, but I will say you are making a pretty general bias here that is pretty generally not accurate.
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work, the company standard IDEs for web development are Dreamweaver or Eclipse. Both are completely unacceptable. Yet, a F/OSS text editor like jEdit is nonstandard but allows me to be much more productive. Why? Because it allows me to work quickly. I have all of the powerful text editing tools of an IDE without the extreme overhead.
Also, as someone else replied, Firefox and certain plugins like Firebug and the Tidy validator are critical. I am a web developer, you see, and IE's ultracrappy javascript debugging capabilities are not even worth considering (even with the insanely useless MSFT Dev Toolbar installed). Profiling AJAX calls, or ANY HTTP request, is impossible without a tool like Firebug. And they are all nonstandard, but without them it would be more time consuming if not practically impossible for me to debug or optimize web pages.
I am not trying to install iTunes or GAIM or games. Stupid people install that stuff at work. I just want to use tools that will allow me to get the job done. The web and its technologies are rapidly changing. Company Standard Software committees do not seem to be able to keep up, at least where I work. So, you can either 1) fight the establishment and risk looking like an "OSS hippie troublemaker" and still never get what you need, 2) work with approved but ineffective and usually expensive tools, or 3) just install what you need and produce good work. Within reason, I go with option number 3.
So...unauthorized software isn't always better; authorized software isn't always better.
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Do it but don't admit it
- Or don't it but are way less productive than their peers
I don't know how it is for the rest of the slashdot crowd but almost everywhere I've worked it's impossible to be (decently) productive using only authorized software.
Re:What about the other half? (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, a self important ass that believes his world view is the only correct one. Gotcha.
OK OK, I'll give notepad another chance for my code editing, and I'm sure I can come up with two decent
Ya... because it's either VIM or notepad. Well have fun installing all the crap you think you need, I need to get back to doing actual work.
Funny that (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people born after 1980 are treated like shit in the IT industry. You are taken on for pitiful wages with vague promises of future riches, squeezed for every bit of knowledge you have, then booted out when the project(s) you are working on are finished. So it is hardly surprising that people treated so shabbily don't have a particular commitment to their workplace.
Most of the highly technical and well paid jobs (system admins and the like) seem to be already taken by well established old folk, and nobody is really interested in training anybody for when they retire. Managers take IT systems completely for granted, consider IT professionals to be lowly peons, and are in for a nasty shock when the handful of people keeping their systems running leave.
Re:Funny that (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Funny that (Score:5, Insightful)
Not much to this story (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to secure your network, you need to address all the risks that are out there. Adding a little more risky behavior does not really make for any real changes is the risks to the network. Networks are always at risk from the weakest link. A 60 year old employee who happens to do something risky is just as bad for the network as a 20 year old.
Fair Trade (Score:5, Funny)
They're also less likely to call IT with problems like "I'm trying to make an Internet on my desktop but I can't get the file to program."
Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)
Unauthorized software (Score:5, Interesting)
My company doesn't give me administrator privilages, but has IE 5.5 installed. They haven't told me exactly what I can or can't do with my computer (except "you can browse the web in your down-time, but don't look at porn"), but I don't think the people that immediately oversee me know enough about computers to understand installing programs and stuff (really, it's pretty amazing--they don't even know that IE 5.5 is different at all from whatever they use at home).
The computer won't let my upgrade IE, so I installed Opera and Firefox. Is this "unauthorized software"?
Now, let's go a step more complicated.
They said I can browse the web in my downtime, right. So I figured I can also download and view MIT physics lectures (yes, Walter Lewin). My computer doesn't have proper codecs to view these videos. So I had to install codecs, but the computer is very resistant to that--it took a lot of trial and error to find a codec that would install and also play the videos.
Did the larger amount of work to avoid the problems associated with a lack of administrator privileges make this "unauthorized"?
I've also tweaked the registry (this is Windows 2000) because there were several programs starting with the computer that I have no use for. "Unauthorized"?
I'm in my mid-20's (Score:5, Insightful)
I know some of my peers feel that simply having access to the Internet means they can use it during the workday either to take a break during the work period, not work at all or use the Internet on breaks. My friends don't do this but I have had co-workers who have and were generally disciplined and eventually fired for not doing their assigned work.
Personally, I feel that I have an obligation to my employer: 1) to do the tasks I am assigned and 2) to protect the information on their networks. I avoid using the Net at work for non-work tasks and social networks for these reasons.
Age, not generation (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in my 20s, I was much more risk prone than I am now (in my 40s). Back then I considered it my *right* to be able to install whatever I wanted on a computer, and would be unconditionally annoyed and offended if it was not allowed. Today I am more aware that there are reasons for most restrictions. Yes, some restrictions don't make sense, but a very many do.
This type of thinking was in more aspects of life than just computers. Back in my 20s, I would say that I drove less cautiously than I do today. I drank more heavily, ate poorly, resented having to wear a bike helmet, jay-walked more often, the list goes on. These are all behaviours that I, and most people, grow out of.
Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
Or when I'm dealing with silly amounts of calls because one 40+ yr old colleague is stood outside on their mobile phone arranging with their wife who is doing the cooking and the other is browsing holiday sites deciding where to go on holiday next.
Articles like this are stupid, they're a generalisation and where I work it couldn't be further from the truth. 3 out of 4 of our 1980s+ born workers and 1 out of 12 of our pre 1980s born workers make up our best 4 workers, that's completely out of line with the articles findings and whilst I realise you always get anomalies from statistical samples you should also not try and dress up this kind of bullshit as general fact.
In fact look at TFA, as hard as that is when it insists on jumping to the next stat before you've had chance to check the page properly I don't notice any information how solid a test base they used.
For all I know this could be put together by some disgruntled middle aged worker who actually sucks bad at his job but like many would rather blame someone else and so decided to blame the younger generation for taking his work.
Anyone know how reasonable a test base was used for this study? As it stands I could equally put together a made up study claiming older people are more likely to steal from the work place and pass it off as being fact.
Re:Contradiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm surprised how high the risk is anyway (Score:5, Funny)