How Should We Handle Developers Violating Security Policies and Leaving Abruptly?

Urgent Assistance Required: Policy Violation by Developers

Kindly help me out. This is the situation: a team of our employees—Developers—has violated the Data Security Policy, Information Security Policy, and HR Policy of the company.

• They tried to delete the database of several projects by writing some Truncate scripts in the code.

• They have put some encrypted code for the database, locking it, and we are unable to make any edits now. Our team is working on decrypting the code to unlock the database, but it's still in progress.

• After salary credit, all the employees left with immediate effect, citing unimportant reasons. When we contacted them for a solution, they refused to help and told us that we could do whatever we wanted.

Please let me know the proper course of action that should be taken against them. Looking forward to your valuable suggestions.

Thanks and Regards,
Sanjana

Have the employees signed the relevant policies in place, like NDA, Data Security, etc.?

Since when were they working in your company? And what was the general behavioral pattern of this lot? There have been cases where competitors have 'planted' their people in rival companies just to steal data/projects.

This is an outright case of data theft—just go and lodge a police complaint with the Cyber Crimes Cell in your city (ordinary police stations wouldn't accept such complaints due to a lack of wherewithal and knowledge).

You may also need to have the necessary documentation proofs that they were contacted and they denied any help.

Do you know where they went—meaning where did they join from your company?

Now, looking at this situation from another angle, it could be pointing to the possibility of a very serious HR problem within the company—unless there was something very wrong with the general working atmosphere, a bunch of employees wouldn't leave the way you say they did (however, this doesn't justify what they actually did—data theft—for which they ought to face the consequences). This could also be pointing to the lack of suitable checks and balances in the technical teams. There would definitely have been some tell-tale signs that were missed, obviously.

All the best.

Regards,
TS