Addressing Rampant Data Theft When Employees Are On The Way Out
By: Jim Stickley and Tina Davis
August 22, 2020
Leaving a job by choice, or not, presents a unique challenge to employers these days. At a time when sensitive data is easily accessible to those in a workplace, keeping that data from leaving when an employee permanently exits is a problem. Employee data theft is the biggest “insider incident” facing companies, and of course there are always the “outsider incidents” like bad actors looking to steal data. Certain employees are more of a flight risk than others and a Securonix study finds 80% of those employees steal data that belongs to their former employer.
According to Securonix, those businesses most affected by insider theft are pharmaceutical, IT, and financial industries. These industries already expect the highly sensitive information they hold to be vulnerable to outside hackers. But when the call is coming from inside the house, it’s time to revisit employee access to data and find ways to keep it from going out the door.
The study also found commonality among those who leave a job with data that belongs to their employer. Employees planning to leave a job often change their behavior patterns two weeks to two months before their insider attack. They often use email transfers and uploads to cloud services like Dropbox while abusing their account privileges to do so. Not only are employees a data theft concern, contractors who have access privileges can also help themselves to data. They can upload or move sensitive information to third-party sources with no one being any the wiser–until it’s too late.
Currently, there’s no easy answer to entirely stop the data theft problem, but security professionals realize the threat insider attacks present for all enterprise and they’re actively working on ways to solve it. In the meantime, there are steps businesses can take to begin minimizing the threat of their data walking out the door.
Keeping a Grip on Company Data
- Have non-disclosure agreements for all employees. They should include policies on data loss prevention and should be updated regularly.
- Employees using their personal device for work should agree to a strong policy for company data ownership including removal from the device once the employment ends or prohibition of having it stored on the device at all.
- Limit employee access to IT systems and the workspace. Access to data should be immediately cut off when an employee leaves the company, for any reason. Any security badges or other ways allowing an ex-employee to enter the building should be deactivated immediately.
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