Wire services: Ponemon Institute Study
New Study Links Inadequate Resources and Leadership to Increased Insider Threats
Privacy and information management research firm the Ponemon Institute andArcSight, Inc., a global leader in Enterprise Security Management (ESM) software, today released a new study showing that IT security professionals believe poor leadership at the executive level, coupled with a lack of accountability, is a major contributor to the breakdown in corporate data integrity. The study, National Survey on Managing the Insider Threats, is drawn from the responses of more than 450 U.S.-based IT security professionals, and points to resource and leadership failures as a primary cause of employee complacency, negligence and malicious behaviour resulting in both intentional and inadvertent compromise of business and personal information.
The study, sponsored by ArcSight, examines experienced IT security professionals' opinions related to the causes, responses and solutions to the insider threat to data integrity. For the purposes of the study, "insider threat" is defined as the misuse or destruction of sensitive or confidential information, as well as IT infrastructure that houses this data, by employees, contractors and others with access to sensitive or confidential information. The National Survey on Managing the Insider Threats found that:
- More than 78% of respondents reported one or more unreported insider-related security breaches within their company.
- 93% of respondents attributed lack of resources and 81% of respondents cited lack of accountability as two primary contributing factors to poor data security.
- Respondents ranked the top three threats to data integrity as:
- Missed or failed security patches on critical applications
- Accidental or malicious insider misuse of sensitive or confidential data
- Virus, malware, and spyware infections
- 89% view insider threats as serious, yet only 49% think CEOs have the same perception.
Copies of Survey on Managing the Insider Threat are available through the Ponemon Institute and through ArcSight.
