Businesses are risking losing confidential data because they are
not taking the threat posed by staff redundancies seriously
enough.
The InfoSecurity Europe poll 2009 found that 478 out of 532 IT
decision-makers surveyed believe that security risks will increase
in 2009. This is largely due to the economic crisis and inevitable
job losses, leading to affected people looking at ways to damage IT
systems, according to analyst IDC.
When IT staff are let go, they pose a risk to the company, since
they have intimate knowledge of IT systems and how they can be
damaged.
"Be aware of frustration hacking," warns Eric Domage, a research
analyst at IDC. Domage said that IT savvy staff can delete servers,
encrypt IT systems or take company data as a protest when they are
made redundant.
"The internal threat from one time hacking is a major threat to
businesses." Companies can protect against external threats, and
can trace logs to identify internal fraud, but are too easily
caught by one-off instances of electronic vandalism.
Domage recommended that users run encryption software to protect
confidential data.