Employees Couldn’t Care Less about Data Security

June 16th, 2009 by Agent Smith (1) DLP,Research and Studies

More and more employees chose to overlook data security policies put in place by the companies they work for and engage in activities that could easily lead to data breaches, according to the findings of a new Ponemon Institute survey. The risky activities include taking private records with them on unsecured storage devices, downloading personal software on company systems, turning off security settings and networking on social media sites.

Most members of a company’s staff copy classified data to USB drives or turn off security settings on their work laptops. Compared to the Institute’s 2007 findings, the numbers of those ignoring company policies has increased.

Here are some highlights of the survey findings, as presented by PC World:

69 percent of the 967 IT professionals surveyed copied confidential company data to USB sticks
those who lost said USB sticks with confidential corporate data on them failed to report it immediately
almost 31 percent of respondents engaged in social-networking practices on the Web from work PCs
around 53 percent said they downloaded personal software on corporate PCs

Employees Dodge Security to Increase their Productivity

October 28th, 2008 by Agent Smith (0) Research and Studies,security breach

The most recent survey released by security firm RSA showed that technology workers are very resourceful when it comes to bypassing corporate security policies to get their work done more effectively.

The 2008 Insider Threat Survey showed that over 50% of those surveyed believed security policies to be too restrictive. The overwhelming majority is familiar with the policies enforced by their employers, that’s why they know how to circumvent them. As a consequence, more than half manage to access their work email accounts from public computers and even more check their emails through public wireless networks.

According to the Security Focus article on the survey, respondents came from three different countries, the US, Brazil and Mexico.

What solutions are there for companies in these conditions? Tightening security would definitely not be the answer. Instead of blocking their access to technological advantages, they should adapt their security solutions to enable access while still preserving the desired level of security.

Employees Are Great at Circumventing IT Security Policies

April 7th, 2008 by Agent Smith (0) security breach

According to a survey conducted by Palo Alto Networks and quoted by DarkReading, employees in most enterprises are constantly circumventing corporate security policies by deploying unauthorized applications, including video viewers, streaming audio, P2P, and Google applications.

Palo Alto Networks used data from 20 different enterprises, gathered during vulnerability assessments, to reach the study results.

Employees are using a broad variety of tactics for circumventing IT policies on network usage, Palo Alto found. For example, approximately 80 percent of the enterprises are supporting proxy applications, such as KProxy or CGI proxies, which mask the user’s identity and surfing habits from IT monitoring tools.
“There’s no business reason for using proxies in the enterprise, other than to hide your activity from IT,” Mullaney says. “But we see at least some use of them in most of the enterprises we [assess].”