Over a Third of Employees Willing to Sell Company Data

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A survey commissioned by Infosecurity Europe has revealed that 37 percent of the questioned employees would consider handing over business records to third-parties for the right incentive. This comes to strengthen the claim that insider threats are on the rise, which has also been amongst the conclusions outlined in other recent reports.

This study was performed with the help of London commuters. Over 85 percent of the people participating to the survey considered that the information they could obtain from work was valuable. It was revealed that 83 percent had access to customer databases, while 51 percent to human resource databases, information generally targeted by spammers and identity thieves.

But companies don't only risk damaging their public image and losing customers in case of a data leak incident of this sort, but are also exposed to corporate espionage, as 72 percent of workers had access to business plans, 53 percent to accounting systems, and 37 percent to administrative passwords for the IT systems.

While it's comforting to see that almost two thirds of employees would not be willing to become insider spies for less than £1 million, which is a rather high and improbable sum of money for a bribe, the remaining ones still represent a significant threat.

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