Insider Threat Increases; Unstructured Data Poses Large Risk

Recent research results have shown that the threat from loss of data from "inside" jobs is increasing. In other news, unstructured data is shown to present a large security exposure, while a separate report cited laptop losses at airports at a rate of 12,000 per week.

Focal Points:

• A recent report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that almost 16 percent of company security breaches to date this year are insider attacks. This number is up from 6 percent insider attacks in 2007. The survey also showed that external attacks decreased 14.1 percent from 2007. The report also showed that in about 59 percent of breaches, companies published the number of records that were involved in breaches, with the remainder not reporting the potentially exposed data. About 81 percent of these breaches were electronic, with the remainder being paper breaches. ID Analytics, Inc., who cooperated with ITRC for this report, found that 39 percent of the data theft was a result of lost or stolen devices.
• A new report from the Ponemon Institute found that only 23 percent of its survey respondents felt their companies' unstructured data was properly secured. The institute polled 870 IT professionals, where 84 percent said that too many workers are able to access critical corporate information as unstructured data. In addition, the survey found that almost 76 percent of companies have no process to control employee access to unstructured data. Experton Group believes it will be difficult to automatically protect all unstructured data, since it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the importance of unstructured data when it is created. Unstructured data includes information in email, instant messages, published documents, and spreadsheets.
• Another recent Ponemon study of 106 US airports found that almost 12,000 laptop computers are lost each week. Of these, about 70 percent are not recovered. The report also claimed that many more laptops are lost than companies disclose. Of the lost laptops, travelers said that about half of them contain either customer data or confidential business information. While other public reports, such as from Attrition.org, show much lower losses, Ponemon's studies conclude this is because employees are embarrassed to report the loss, in addition the fact that  many companies do not report these losses. The report found that most losses occur at security checkpoints and departure gates.

Experton Group believes data loss will continue to be a major security issue for most companies, with not enough emphasis being paid to data protection. While network access methods need to be in place, the security focus should change to emphasize the protection of corporate data. Most studies are clearly pointing out that data loss largely occurs from the inside, either via users' intentional theft of data, or unintentional loss of laptops of other devices that contain corporate information. IT executives should establish a data-centric architecture for security corporate information.