On Average, 28 Percent of Employees Are Transferring Company Information via Personal Email, Personal Cloud File Share Accounts and USB Storage Devices
VERO BEACH, FL–(Marketwired – Sep 24, 2013) – SpectorSoft today released results of its recent survey, revealing that 23 percent of enterprises have suffered from an insider-driven data breach; on average, 28 percent of employees are using personal cloud email, file-sharing accounts and USB storage devices to transfer corporate data; and intellectual property (IP) is among the most frequently breached data types. The survey, conducted in August, polled 419 enterprise respondents and 200 full-time end-user employees, all from U.S.-based organizations. Both sets of respondents worked in companies of various sizes and within multiple industries.
“This survey reveals that the insider threat is alive and well, that employers haven’t yet figured out how to discourage or prohibit unsafe data handling practices, and that enterprises’ most valuable data is at risk,” said Jason Judge, CEO, SpectorSoft. “To protect themselves against the insider threat, organizations need visibility into precisely what their employees are doing, something that can’t be captured with traditional technologies.”
Additional survey findings drawn from enterprise respondents include the following:
- 77 percent have policies against employees using corporate computers for personal use.
- 98 percent have discovered employees visiting non-work-related websites with company computers.
- 47 percent discovered that former employees took information with them when they left the company.
- 44 percent of the time, insider-driven breaches include intellectual property, business plans, technology designs, M&A information and information that corporate policy says should not be sent outside of the organization.
- 53 percent of enterprise respondents have discovered that employees are using company-issued devices to send various types of company information to personal email accounts and cloud-based file-sharing accounts such as Box, DropBox or Hightail (Formerly YouSendIt).
Additional survey findings drawn from employee respondents include the following:
- 33 percent transfer corporate information via personal Yahoo! email and Gmail accounts.
- 23 percent transfer corporate information using Box, Dropbox or Hightail (Formerly YouSendIt).
- 28 percent transfer corporate information using USB storage devices.
For more details on the survey findings please access the full report at http://www.spector360recon.com/report.