New research reveals that 94% of IT professionals have seen their digital infrastructures hacked by outsiders or had their own co-workers compromise data.
Moreover, 79% of the people polled are worried that their current organisation could be next, according to data discovery software provider Exonar.
Having surveyed 500 IT professionals, the researchers discovered that employee data breaches are seen as the biggest cybersecurity risk to an organisation, with 40% of respondents named employee data breaches as the biggest overall threat to information security in the coming year.
Other threats identified was external attacks, with 21% identifying external attacks from cybercriminals as the biggest risk to information security. One in five believed it is ransomware and other malware attacks were the biggest threats.
When looking at what causes employee data breaches, 51% of IT professionals say these most commonly occur through external email services such as Gmail and Outlook.
However, 42% say employee data breaches have happened through collaboration tools such as Slack and Dropbox, and 41% through SMS/messaging services. Just 6% of those surveyed said they had never knowingly experienced a data breach.
“In simply performing their jobs, employees can unintentionally be the source of a data breach – by leaving high-risk information unprotected in the wrong place,” said Danny Reeves, CEO of Exonar. “It’s the responsibility of the company to provide the right methodology, technology, and processes that enable the workforce to continue to operate without burdening teams with undue process.
“These days, every company is a data company, and large organisations often have thousands of systems and storage facilities. Unless companies are actively taking steps to know and understand their data, they’re leaving themselves vulnerable.”
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