With Data Theft by Employees on the Rise You Need Better Cyber Security Protection

It’s an unfortunate fact of doing business today: employee-caused data breaches are on the rise. And, with more incentive than ever to do it, fired or even dissatisfied and wandering-eyed staff members are further encouraged by substandard cyber defenses in a given computer network. This is why you need to prevent data theft by employees with stronger cyber security protection.

Don’t let your employees become opportunistic cyber-thieves. Discourage their tendencies to want to steal and exploit their company’s sensitive, proprietary data with employee tracking and monitoring software, such as Veriato 360, which, as its name implies, hits all 360 degrees on the compass of business intelligence.

The Statistics on Employee Cyber Breach

The statistics on internal cyber breach don’t lie, and clearly show that companies who don’t do enough in the way of cyber defense are leaving themselves open to liabilities that threaten their existence as an organization.

Case in point:

85% of employees admitted to taking company documents and information when they left a business.

And it’s not just when employees leave that your data can be stolen. One-third of employees access sensitive data to do their jobs. Some act out of pure greed. Organizations with intellectual property and trade secrets are especially at risk of insider espionage. This was the primary motive for data theft, with 5% of insider attacks in 2009 growing to 25% in 2015.

Now, in 2017, that percentage of employee data theft is likely even higher.

As the number of reported data breaches continues to blitz U.S. companies — over 6 million records exposed as of May 2016, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center — IT budgets are ballooning to combat what corporations see as their greatest threat: faceless, sophisticated hackers from an outside entity.

But in reality, a bigger danger to many companies and to customers’ sensitive data comes from seemingly benign faces inside the same companies that are trying to keep hackers out: a loan officer tasked with handling customers’ e-mail, an attendant at a nursing home, a unit coordinator for the main operating room at a well-regarded city hospital.

According to Verizon’s 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, about 50 percent of all security incidents — any event that compromises the confidentiality, integrity or availability of an information asset — are caused by people inside an organization.

And while 30 percent of all cases are due to worker negligence like delivering sensitive information to the wrong recipient or the insecure disposal of personal and medical data, roughly 20 percent are considered insider misuse events, where employees could be stealing and/or profiting from company-owned or protected information.

Often, that translates to employees on the front lines stealing patient medical data or client social security numbers, which can then be sold on the black market or used to commit fraud like collecting someone else’s social security benefits, opening new credit card accounts in another’s name, or applying for health insurance by assuming the identity of someone else.

(Source: CNBC.com)

It’s All About Risk Mitigation

The risk of malicious activity has never been more of a reality for businesses today. Think about this: If you run a healthcare, financial services, educational institution, or other organization regulated by compliance laws, you’re that much more at risk of a disgruntled employee making off with client or patient information that’s worth money to black hat hackers on the dark web.

As a business owner or IT professional, you simply don’t have time for this. You need an IT security company in Atlanta who can get you into the “Safe Zone” where concerns keeping you virtually indemnified against both external and internal exploits, exfiltration incidents, and cyberattacks.

The more time you spend trying to investigate what happened and who’s responsible, the less time you have for making things better – plus, you’re losing valuable time for your customer relations and fundamental business at hand.

Some important questions to ask yourself on the subject are:

How often have you wished you could see exactly what a user did – for troubleshooting purposes?

When was the last time you were told to put everything on hold so you could assist with investigating someone’s actions?

The only real way to tell the difference between an employee doing their job and one who’s stealing from you is to monitor their behavior and implement data theft prevention protocols.

The Veriato Difference in Employee Monitoring

Veriato 360 lets you go back in time while taking the guess work out of the equation. It’s like an IT time machine that gives you clarity and a full picture of what’s going on in your organization, including results like:

  • Gray areas become clearly black and white.
  • You’ll know who’s using what resources, for how long and why.
  • You’ll see who’s moving data, including off network to USB or shadow IT services.
  • You can easily review recordings of activity, like watching a movie via DVR.

Veriato 360’s screen-capture records everything on a monitored computer screen with the following features and options:

  • You define how frequently you wish to capture the screen, from the default of every 30 seconds to as often as every second.
  • Video playback of screen activity lets you see exactly what happened. Play it back, just like you do with your DVR.
  • Export screen shots as individual BMP or JPG graphic files. Multiple snapshots can be exported together as an AVI video file.

Protect Your Livelihood from Cyber Opportunism

Don’t get blindsided by an internal data breach, aka employee theft of your valuable trade secrets or proprietary information. Register now for our Webinar on August 30th and secure your place for this exclusive event that will further illustrate how you can prevent employee data theft in your organization.

For additional information about Veriato 360, employee data theft prevention, and a free demo, please feel free to contact your Atlanta Cyber Security Experts Centerpoint IT at (404) 781-0200 or sales@centerpointit.com.

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