From NewScientist:
EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organization reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalizing suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
The Florida Institute of Technology analyzed Enron’s emails and found a correlation between the frequency of emails and their source and destination to the contiuied decline of the company. I love this type of research! Human interaction always seems to increase when “something is going down”.
This community of people asking questions and communicating more is a main reason why we recommend people to use Security Awareness as a mechanism to detect the internal “bad apple”, especially when layoffs or key employees will be let go.
With these new email analysis techniques, perhaps analyzing odd patterns of communication may be another indicator that a problem may be forming with a bad employee…
According to the article:
They examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails’ content.
which is something any business can do by working with their mail server admin. Maybe someone will write an open source application that can do this for any business.
Too bad email information is not public for companies that trade on the stock exchanges as this would be a great technical analysis tool!
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