Been a good IT employee requires you planning for you not been there. An accident, illness or an alien abduction can happen any moment. You need to plan ahead of time for this as part of your disaster recovery plan.
A good IT guy should document procedures, passwords and all he does so that who ever replaces him can take over the job.
Owners should request this as part of the IT guy duties, but medium and small businesses frequently miss to take care of this before hand. More often than not employers find themselves in hot water when they decide to fire the IT guy. They fear he could take revenge. They may be right.
If you fired your IT guy, most likely he has had access to a lot of private information and knows the weaknesses of your company’s network, thus if he wanted, he could do a lot of damage. If you are lucky enough to have an IT guy with morals, you will be fine. If not, then you need help …and you always thought religion was good for nothing.
There are some steps you need to take to minimize the risks of him accessing your network or accounts:
- Change the settings for your network admin accounts.
- If your email server is hosted, change the settings for the admin account as well as for all email accounts.
- Change all the passwords for all online accounts he may have access to. This includes banks, Paypal, eBay, phone company, cable company, online stores, conferencing services, suppliers, software vendors, hardware vendors, online advertisement, Skype, Logmein, messenger, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on.
- Make sure he is no longer an authorized user / contact of any of the above.
- Change all passwords for your website hosting account, FTP access, SSH anything that could allow access to your website infrastructure.
- Run scans in all servers and computers looking for spy and remote access programs.
- Change settings for all VPN, remote desktop, and terminal server users. Make sure you leave just enough admin users as necessary.
- If you have an internet facing router make sure you change its remote administration settings.
- Change your wireless network properties.
- Run a port scan on your network to make sure no unneeded ports are open.
- Run a network survey to make sure there are no outgoing or incoming connections of unknown origin.
- Change passwords for your PBX admin account as well as all users’ voicemails.
- Remember that if he created online accounts, he may have the security questions and answers, so even if you change the passwords he may be able to gain access to the accounts. You need to make sure you go over the security questions too.
Your new IT guy or a consultant can help you take care of the items numbered above, I would not recommend you doing it yourself, someone in the IT field will have a better grasp of how much your former computer guy may know.
If you are an owner in good terms with your IT guy, you should go over the list and ask him to document all he does. You never know what the future will bring. If you think I am an alarmist keep reading.
Here are some recent disgruntled IT guys taking a punch back to their former employers:
Jason Wang wreaks Harlem’s North General Hospital Computer Network
San Fancisco city’s network hijacked by former employee
Disgruntled employee hacks Webtech Plus, remotely disables 100+ cars
Ex-Employee Fingered in Texas Power Company Hack
