Your Biggest Cybersecurity Threat Isn't Coming From the Outside

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5787-business-biggest-security-threat.html

By Elizabeth Palermo
BusinessNewsDaily Contributor
January 17, 2014

The biggest threat to your company's cybersecurity isn't malware, phishing 
scams or even hackers -- it's you. In a series of studies published last 
week, three security research firms asked employees at midsize businesses 
across America about the biggest threats to corporate cybersecurity. And 
while the surveys each pointed to slightly different culprits, the verdict 
was clear: employees are the weakest link in the security chain.

The largest of the three studies -- a Stroz Friedberg online survey of 
more than 700 information workers -- found that senior management may be 
the biggest threat to an organization's digital well-being. Fifty-eight 
percent of senior managers reported having (digitally) sent sensitive 
information to the wrong person. Compare that with just 25 percent of 
lower-level employees guilty of the same misstep. And more than half of 
all senior managers in the study admitted to taking files with them after 
they left a job. Only 25 percent of rank-and-file employees were found to 
have done the same.

The Stroz Friedberg study also found that 9 in 10 senior managers admitted 
to uploading work files to personal email and cloud-based accounts, a faux 
pas that could lead to intellectual property theft and attacks on 
corporate networks.

In a second study by Osterman Research, 160 security professionals were 
asked about the biggest cyberthreats facing their companies. Seventy-four 
percent of respondents said that malware had posed a significant threat to 
their networks in the past year, while 64 percent said the same for email 
scams.

[...]



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