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Shelley Sawers, wife of the new head of the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6, opened a Facebook account and posted photographs of her family, the location of their home and the identities of several close family friends and associates.

Her husband must’ve been pretty surprised to learn his wife had posted such personal information (as well as pictures of him in his swim trunks) on a social networking site, given that MI6 employees are bound by strict secrecy guidelines.

Mrs. Sawers’ family will most-likely need to be moved and her children may now need extra protection.

The move was not only an embarrassment for her husband, but the British government, which just announced its new “strategy for cyber security,” a cross-government program to address the UK’s cyber security issues.

You may not be head of the Secret Intelligence Service, but how important do you think it is to keep personal information or pictures off social networking sites?

Don’t ask people to e-mail you.

Apparently, spammers have been trolling Twitter to locate fresh e-mail addresses to add to their lists. The common strategy is to use a program that searches the site for phrases like “E-mail me at” or “Contact me at” and automatically copies the address that follows.

Experts recommend keeping e-mail addresses out of Twitter posts. In a post about an open position, for example, instead of giving an e-mail address to send resumes, give readers a link to a listing on a job board or your company’s site.

One in five companies have experienced insider sabotage or security fraud by a member of the IT staff, according to a new survey of 400 IT administrators by CyberArk. Of those companies, 36% say the IT employee delivered privileged information to a competitor.

Overall, 33% of IT workers admit they’ve used their administration rights to access confidential information, such as HR records, customer databases and layoff lists.

To make sure your business isn’t the victim of sabotage or theft, here are some tips experts recommend:

• Perform reference/background checks — Checking applicants’ history is one way to keep out IT staffers who might abuse their access privileges.
• Make sure the rules are clear — IT employees can be more likely to violate policies than other employees because they have a better idea of how to get around technology controls. That’s why it’s important to have rules about who can access what and discipline people who break them.
• Restrict access — Employees should only be able to view data that they need for their jobs.
• Change passwords — Passwords should be changed regularly and be complex enough to stay unpredictable. That’ll reduce the likelihood of unauthorized employees (or even ex-employees) accessing things they shouldn’t.

London law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer — the fourth largest firm in the world — recently had to lay off 14 attorneys.

That’s nothing new — like any other business, many law offices have had to make cutbacks. What sets Freshfields apart is the way it did the deed.

Normally, you’d expect the firm’s partners to deliver the news to the unlucky 14. But Freshfields’ head honchos delegated the dirty work to the company’s HR department.

But apparently the HR staffers weren’t up to the task either. So instead of arranging meetings, they made phone calls. And in a few cases where the attorneys didn’t pick up, they left messages with details of the layoff.

News about job loss is obviously hard to take, but hearing it on your answering machine certainly doesn’t help. One of Freshfields’ ex-employees called the partners “gutless” and said HR’s strategy “obviously made people feel incredibly under-valued,” the UK’s Daily Mail reports.

The firm’s defense: It was just the quickest and most efficient way to spread the word. A company spokesperson said the method wasn’t ideal, but “we were trying to get the information out as soon as possible.”

Experts recommend always delivering bad news in person. Not only is it simply the right thing to do, but how the termination process is carried out can affect whether or not someone’s angry enough to take an ex-employer to court.

That’s what researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology say in a recent report. They looked at e-mail records at Enron in the months leading up to the company’s demise. Here’s what they found:

A month before the collapse, the number of “active e-mail cliques” — defined as groups in which every member has had direct e-mail contact with every other member — jump from about 100 to almost 800. Also, messages within those groups became more frequent but were sent to employees outside the group less often, the New Scientist reports.

The researchers say it’s a characteristic behavior in organizations experiencing a crisis — employees speak more often with co-workers they know, and withhold information with those they don’t.

“Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful,” says Gilbert Peterson of the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, who has also studied Enron’s e-mails.

Some problems, though: Enron’s a pretty special case, and what happened there may not be indicative of what would happen at other companies.

And there are probably easier ways to sniff out discontent among employees than a complex analysis of their e-mail habits.

Most are spending more time on social networking sites and less money on job boards like CareerBuilder and Monster, according to a recent survey by Jobvite, a recruiting software provider.

Of the 440 HR pros who responded, 72% said their company will invest more in recruiting through social networks this year. Meanwhile, more than half expect to spend less on job boards.

What online tools are getting the most use? The most popular social networks for recruiters and HR pros:

• Linkedin (used by 80% of those who responded)
• Twitter (42%)
• Facebook (36%)
• Jobster (17%)
• Myspace (13%).

Other traditional, low-cost methods are getting more attention in this economy as well — for example, 68% of companies said they plan to increase the use of employee referrals.

The company’s working on a formula that can help them predict who’s most likely to resign.

The formula, which is still being tested and kept secret, uses data from performance reviews, surveys and pay and performance histories to identify employees who are likely to quit in the near future, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Presumably, they’ll take what they find and look for ways to convince those employees to stay.

Google’s had some retention issues lately, as several top employees have left the company. But is designing an equation to identify potential quitters the answer, or is it a needlessly complicated technical solution for an age-old personnel problem?

Some folks think it’s the latter. “They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged,” career consultant Valerie Frederickson was quoted as saying in the WSJ article. “If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people.”

Sounds like the general advice every company needs to follow.

A woman was recently arrested for stealing from her employer — and using the money to pay back an employer she’d stolen from previously.

Got that? Here are the details:

Kathy Foer-Morse worked as a paralegal for a law firm in Norristown, Pennsylvania. She was recently fired, arrested and charged with stealing $100,937 from the firm. Allegedly, she’d been writing herself fraudulent checks from estate accounts the firm managed, the Pottstown Mercury reports.

Police said Foer-Morse was sending the money to her previous employer, a law firm in New York City. She owed them restitution after she was caught stealing $285,000 while she worked there.

No word on whether the firm knew about her past when it hired her, but we’re guessing she found a way to hide it from them.

Probably not, experts say.

The automated Telephone Number Employer Verification (TEVN) system is set to be available in late September, replacing the current operator-assisted hot line.

TEVN will allow employers to verify up to 10 names and SSNs at a time without having to wait to get an agent on the phone.

It’s definitely an improvement over the hotline, but there’s already a system available that lets employers verify more numbers in less time. The online Social Security Number Verification Service (SSNVS) lets employers:

• verify up to 10 names and SSNs with immediate results, and
• upload files of up to 250,000 names and numbers and get results the next business day.

Plus, both SSNVS and TEVN require you to register with SSA’s Business Services Online. So once that’s done, most employers will have little reason to get on the phone.