Security lockdown
Gone are the days when employees might have stolen a souvenir stapler upon leaving a company to remind them of the hours they whiled away at their desks, as a new survey has found most workers plan on nabbing company info upon leaving their job.
A staggering 70 percent of workers have ‘clear plans' to take data with them on leaving their job, according to a survey by Imperva of 1,000 UK London workers this November.
While it is not a great surprise that a security firm is advocating security, the survey found the most sought after data for employees to take was intellectual property at 27 percent, followed by customer records at 17 percent.
Interestingly, around half of respondents claimed to have ‘personal ownership' of data and this figure climbed to 59 percent in the case that people were about to change jobs and 53 percent if they feared they were about to be dismissed.
Perhaps ironically the survey also discovered that two thirds of respondents would not deliberately take out employer's data upon rumours of dismissal.
Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman, said:"This survey refutes the conventional wisdom that insiders are corporate spies or revenge-seeking employees. It seems most employees have no deliberate intention to cause the company any damage. Rather, this survey indicates that most individuals leaving their jobs suddenly believe that they had rightful ownership to that data just by virtue of their corporate tenure."
Interestingly almost four in five people do not believe their employer has or is aware of any policy to remove collected data from workers' laptops before their departure, which might be surprising seeing as the survey found 85 percent of employees carry corporate data on their mobiles and laptops and three quarters of this data consists of customer record and the remainder mostly intellectual property.
It also discovered that many workers tend to extract information which is beyond their need to know and enterprises have practically no controls in place to prevent excessive privilege access. Over half of those surveyed admitted to accessing data needed outside their role and most of that data was customer records.
Furthermore, almost three quarters of respondents said existing controls in the workplace protecting its data were ‘very easy to bypass'.
