When leaving an employer, some 12% of employees will take sensitive information with them such as customer details, health records, sales contracts, and other confidential data.
This 12% doesn’t include non-sensitive data, such as templates and presentations; it is possible that more than half of workers will leave with this kind of data.
Employees use a few different methods to grab corporate data including screenshots recordings and sync to personal devices or accounts. One employee sent the link of the CEO’s presentation to the press used a screen recording tool to capture the confidential data and then uploaded the recording to a personal account.
Employee termination was a major contributor to data theft and system sabotage last year. In many of the cases employees who had been terminated still had some type of access to their corporate accounts even after they had been laid off. In some cases, current employees provided corporate data or account credentials to their former colleagues without even knowing that they had been terminated. Aside from departing employees, some existing workers can pose threats as well. Some employees maintain side gigs for which they use their corporate device. The unsanctioned use of third-party work on such devices rose almost 200% last year.
What to do for:
Set up policies that clearly defined the difference between personal use and corporate use of data
Make sure policies are conveyed to employees.
Look for early warning signs of malicious intent.
Implement a zero-trust mindset when removing data access for departing employees.
Employee tools that will create a full audit trail, should a problem arise.
What can you do o when this happens to you?
If you find your business has been compromised, immediately shut down.
Identify the breach and determine the extent of damage.
Identify any data which might have been compromised or stolen and inform appropriate parties.
Rebuild the network from a known clean backup.
Install employee monitoring software.
Sources: Lance Whitney, Tech Republic
How to prevent data theft by existing and departing employees (techrepublic.com)
Also: 10 Best Employee Monitoring Software Choices for 2023 | TechRepublic
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