Date:27/07/11

Nearly half of Brits willing to breach company data security, says study

Nearly one half of UK employees polled in a new study said they would be willing to abuse sensitive corporate and customer data if given the chance.The study, commissioned by data security firm SailPoint, found that UK employees were far more willing than their counterparts in the US and Australia to admit openness to activities such as taking records, snooping on salary and performance reports and forwarding files to outside sources.
According to the report, which polled 3,484 full time, part time and contract workers across the three countries, 23.67 per cent of Brits surveyed would be willing to sell proprietary data on the internet.By comparison, 5.32 per cent of Americans and 4.21 per cent of Australians surveyed would be willing to perform the same activity.In all 29 per cent of those surveyed in the UK would look at employee salary information, while 28.98 per cent would check in on performance reviews. Overall, just 51.97 per cent of those surveyed said they would only perform tasks which the company allows. SailPoint co-founder and vice president of marketing Jackie Gilbert told V3 that while the significantly higher numbers in Britain could have been influenced by a number of factors, such as willingness to honestly answer the survey questions or poor morale. "What makes this threat is really influenced by the erosion of company loyalty," Gilbert said. "Clearly employee loyalty and hard times economically could really cause the kind of answers that you are seeing."
One trend that Gilbert noted worldwide is an ignorance to data protection and privacy laws. She explained that for many employees, activities such as copying data upon leaving a company remain something of an ethical grey area. To help remove any doubt, Gilbert suggests that firms make explicitly clear to employees that abusing company data is illegal and will result in prompt legal action again employees. Even with stronger policies in place, however, enterprises risk data breach from internal sources. Gilbert said that even with policies in place to restrict data, users can fall through the cracks and end up with access to sensitive information. "Most companies are only giving access in order for people to perform their job duties," she explained. "But in large company where you have thousands of employees and hundreds of applications, it is a very difficult administrative task to manage who has access to what."

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