Between iPhones, portal USB drives and even iPods, today’s employee has a full arsenal of digital devices that can be used to download and remove classified, competitive information from their employer.
As CIOUpdate reports, an extremely high percentage of workers admit they’ve used these devices and their personal email accounts to send sensitive information to themselves or other outside parties.
According to a report by Ipswitch, a provider of network and file transfer monitoring software, 69 percent of respondents said they send classified information including payroll, customer data and corporate financial data through their personal email account at least once a month. And 34 percent said they do it every day.
Employees are reading, emailing, texting and copying company files around the clock every day, putting customers’ personal information, their jobs and their employers’ reputations at risk in ways that were unimaginable just two or three years ago.
And now the onus is on the CIO and his or her IT security team to put the toothpaste back in the tube at a time when most employees have multiple personal email accounts, smartphones with more computing power than some desktops in their office, and portable media devices and drives capable of downloading years’ worth of sensitive financial information.
That sums up the findings of a new study proffered by Ipswitch, a provider of network and file transfer monitoring software.
According to Ipswitch, 40 percent of attendees surveyed at this year’s InfoSecurity Europe conference said they routinely violated their companies’ security and compliance rules by sending confidential information through their personal email accounts.