Employers have long recognized that conducting due diligence on new hires is a mission critical task. When it comes to any position dealing with Information Technology (IT), the stakes go up exponentially due to the sensitive nature of access to data and systems that operate the company.

Let’s start with the basics: the reason we take off our shoes at the airport is because the shoe bomber tried to get a bomb on a plane. The reason we can only carry on 3-ounce bottles? Someone tried to get a liquid bomb on a plane. Body scanners? Underwear bomber. But what if we took a look at suspicious behavior of the people attempting these acts of terrorism instead of relying primarily on machines to do our dirty work?

Awakened from a deep sleep by the midnight call, the corporate-level chief security officer of this Fortune 500 Company knew he was in for a nightmare. His director of security for the firm’s Texas manufacturing facility was on the brink of panic. “One of our employees gunned down, execution-style, a female coworker at the time-clock, fired multiple shots at other employees, and then blew his brains out in the cafeteria.  The police are here. It’s bad – real bad.”  The CSO knows how the rest of the story will unfold, because local management had severely underestimated future risks when the employee was involved in a serious altercation with the same coworker months earlier.