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- A quarter of employees would sell company data, risking both their jobs and criminal convictions, for less than $8,000.
- Three percent of employees would sell private information for as little as $155, which is the equivalent of a meal for two at a nice restaurant.
- Nearly one in five respondents (18 percent) would accept an offer of $1,550 – approximately the value of a high-end laptop.
- 35 percent of employees were open to bribes as the offer approached $77,500, a sum which could fund a family holiday to Europe.
- A majority (65 percent) of employees said they wouldn’t sell data for any price.
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“While people are generally taking security more seriously there is still a significant group of people who are willing to profit from selling something that doesn’t belong to them. This information can be worth millions of dollars," said Heath Davies, Chief Executive Officer, Clearswift.Insider threats are an issue organizations must confront due to the fact that employees have varied opinions when it comes to data security. According to Clearswift's survey, 29 percent of respondents felt that it was their personal responsibility to help protect their company's sensitive information, whereas one in five (22 percent of) respondents did not feel they had any obligation to help safeguard corporate data. At the same time, another 62 percent of participants said that they did not care enough about the implications of a security breach to change their behavior. Given this lack of consensus, it is up to organizations to look for a number of precursors that might signal an internal party is about to commit an insider attack. They should also consider implementing a suite of solutions that combine active threat intelligence with log management in order to detect these types of attacks before it's too late.
“It is not good business to live in fear of your employees, especially since most can be trusted,” said Davies. “Getting the balance right has always been hard. But truly understanding where the problems come from, combined with advances in technology which can adapt to respond differently to different threats, really changes the game here.”To learn more about how Tripwire can protect your organization against insider threats, please click here. To read more about Clearswift's study, please click here. Title image courtesy of ShutterStock