Never give them anything that could be used as ammo against you again.

I turn around and get in their face. If they're gonna stab me, it's going to be in the chest while I force them to look me square in the eyes.

usually a friendly tap on the shin with a monkey wrench is worth a try.

I find honesty is proof against them. They thrive on subversion and have little or no knowledge of game theory.

Make enough friends to shut em down..

haha, a "quiet" word. I deal with things head on, I am not averse to taking a co-worker aside and asking them how far they want to take things. When confronted bluntly, it usually stops.

do my own thing my way always until I get fired

Never give the Bitch the satisfaction, prove them wrong, making them look bad.

In my experience, this type of person is easily identifiable by any intelligent manager. I've fired a few. You get to know your team, who works hard, who's honest, who has creative ideas, and who just tries to climb on the backs of others. Work with integrity and honesty and you will stand out.

I give them rope.

It all depends on how serious the situation is or is becoming with regard to your employment. There are many different ways to address the matter. Of course, if the situation merits it and it has become nothing short of warfare then you can either take the Machiavellian approach or the Sun Tzu approach, sometimes a combination of both works very well.

By no longer working in an office or workplace where people sit around gossiping and backstabbing rather than do something useful. Yes, I had my fill and more of that. In my own office the only backstabber now is me. I discovered in any office you find the same people: the Burnout; the Gossiper; the Hypochondriac; the Martyr; the Controlfreak, and yes, the Backstabber. Only the names change.

I used the innovative approach of getting laid off.

The backstabbers in question are now BOTH managers at IBM.

Get a teacher to shoot them.

Refuse to work with them.

I try to ignore any negativity from my colleagues. These are people I didn't choose, just like my relatives. But I don't have toxic friends since I can get rid of toxicity among friends. Previously, every day at work, one of my colleagues started commenting on my actions, blaming me for mistakes, and much more. Sometimes I had to respond to such attacks with passive aggression. But you know, a lot of things change thanks to human awareness. In addition, the leadership noticed our unfriendliness, so they invited an expert on workplace culture to one of our corporate parties. His ideas' Diversity and inclusion led to everyone listening to his suggestions and behaving more understandingly and responsibly.

Depends on the situation. Can they do me any harm? If not, I tend to ignore it since I rarely care about any of them on a personal level. If they are in a position to cause me harm or annoy me significantly then I pretend I didn't find out until I figure out the best way to neutralize the harm.

It would make me sound really really bad if I explained any further ;}

Being the low man on the totem pole and getting thrown infer the bus too many times, I walked out.

Keep them all off FB. I had a GM I never worked with that was on FB. She got to be too much.

Usually I confront them,and stay away from them. Even it I don't confront them, I know enough to stay away from the, don't even talk to them. Haven't talked to my brother in over twenty years because he's a backstaber.

I really don't think I have any. I think in government service there is not nearly the incentive to be a backstabber as there is in some workplaces.

I confronted one recently with my boss as a witness because I told the boss what I was going to do before hand. The man threatened me, told me he was going to kick my ass, told others present why he was going to kick my ass, told the boss why I really had it coming, danced around and then denied everything that he had said about me. The boss told us all to get back to work and I no longer have troubles out of this man today.

I am at work to do my job. Luckily everything in my job is documented multiple times. I had a coworker try to tell my supervisor repeatedly that I kept leaving her dozens of consults so she couldn't do her job until she finished mine. One pop into the log and you see I left no consults unprocessed and that she was altering times in the emergency logs to make it seem like she was responding in reasonable times but the computer system showed that while she logged alarms at these times, they didn't happen until these times. (It would take her 15 minutes to page out a stroke alert. If the call came in for it at 1700, she logged it as being paged out at 1650. Somehow she magically knew a stroke alert was coming through 10 minutes before it happened? Right.)

Avoid whever possible. Document, in writing, every interaction!