Forgive me, but if you were thing that ‘security Threats” are always inbound and caused by deranged "geeks", you are certainly reading it all wrong. According to Cisco, some of the most common employee web-surfing behavior patterns can lead to a tremendous loss in data, company’s Intellectual property.
The report, titled as “The Challenge of Data Leakage for businesses and Employees Around the world” scrutinized over 2000 employees and IT professionals across at least 10 countries, concluded that employees engage in risky behavior that could lead to disaster, even if the companies they are employed with have robust security
policies, checks and tools In place to combat Internet Security.
Apparently, over 75% of the employees don’t use any privacy features while accessing the company’s data through Wi-Fi Networks. An excellent article highlighting this vulnerability has been discussed in another article on brighthub titled “Wireless Network Security: Go anywhere, but play safe “.
Additionally, Social Networking stands out as an eminent threat with the possibility of feeding egregious codes into the company’s systems and networks. There are numerous sites like Myspace, face book and bebo which help friends meet up virtually and exchange all sorts of Information. There are even some niche ones like LinkedIn and Plaxo, which connect business users. The statistics will perhaps show you how seemingly unmanageable it is for IT administrators within a company -- Facebook, for instance, has a total membership count of over 70 million active users and is still counting.
Thankfully, there are ways being suggested to ensure that this is kept as minimal as possible and that employees are trained on how to use the company’s data. The smaller the company or enterprise is, the more important it becomes to standardize this process. It is a must for businesses of all sizes to know and manage their data well, establish and deploy standard codes of conduct for security and IT security; ensure that the company follows a protocol of being open and strive to establish trust within.