Employee turnover often equals business data breaches

Posted by Caitlin on April 8th, 2009

The phrase “employee turnover” is closely linked with the word “unemployment” in the minds of most workers these days, but on the employer side, data breaches are an equally worrisome issue. This is according to a recent national survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute, which found that employee turnover commonly results in significant business data losses.

The Symantec-sponsored report of these survey findings revealed that 59% of employees who left a company for any reason had stolen business data prior to their departure, even though 79% admitted that they violated company rules by doing so. Even more disturbing, 67% of these survey respondents actually used the data they stole, exploiting the former company's confidential information in order to secure a new job. 68% of respondents had future plans to use their former company's stolen data.

According to the survey results, most stolen data involved email communications. The survey revealed that 65% of respondents had taken email lists and 64% had pilfered old emails, while another 38% admitted to sending company data as email attachments to their personal accounts.

Other common types of stolen business information included computer history and hard copy files (62% of respondents), CDs and DVDs (53%) and small USB drives (42%). The rarest type of stolen company data was source code, which was taken by just 3% of respondents.

Unsurprisingly, the survey results also found that disgruntled employees were almost three times as likely to steal company information (61% ) than employees who liked and respected the companies they left (26%).

The report of these survey findings concluded with tips for preventing employee turnover-based data theft, advising companies to take steps that included:

• Conducting an assessment of potential data loss immediately after an employee leaves the company
• Creating or maintaining corporate policies, clearly stating that former employees will be no longer be allowed to access or use any proprietary or confidential company information once they leave
• Implementing a day-to-day monitoring system to keep track of every employee's access to network and system resources in order to discover data breaches at the time they occur and prevent any further damage from occurring

Data breaches can lead to identity theft, among other cyber crimes. To learn more about protecting yourself from data loss and identity theft, see our reviews and comparison charts for identity theft protection and online backup services. You may also be interested in NextAdvisor.com's guide on how to deal with a lost or stolen laptop.

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