Employees cause most corporate data loss

According to a new study from Compuware, IT departments should be rewarded—only 1 percent of corporate data losses this past year were due to hackers. Unfortunately, the buck doesn’t end there. Employees are the largest cause of data breaches, but IT managers also listed outsourcing and malicious employees as two significant reasons why data breaches often occur.a

Compuware reports that of the 1,112 IT practitioners it surveyed, 79 percent reported that their organization had experienced at least one data breach.

This paper also has a couple very interesting graphs (courtesy of arstechnica.com) in it. One is the confidence level that all security breeches, which result in loss of personal information, are being detected by the organization (31% of people are not confident).



And then we get to the key data, who is responsible?


This obviously makes some sense, given that the IT department wasn't hired to teach Security 101 and focus much more on preventing technological security breeches. Companies need to hire an almost equal amount of employees to deal with training and to prevent data loss from a negligent employee!