IT staff snooping on salary details

 

Gallery

By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 19 Jun 2008 at 11:45

One third of IT workers admit snooping on confidential files on the company network including salary details, personal emails and meeting minutes.

A third of those surveyed by Cyber-Ark admitted to having accessed sensitive or confidential information, but an even higher number have succumbed to curiosity in other ways.

Nearly half of respondents to the survey owned up to accessing information which had nothing to do with their job.

These transgressions are made possible because few companies limit access to confidential files and rarely change the password to privileged areas accessed by multiple users.

The survey reveals that nearly a third are only changed once a quarter, and that one in ten are never changed. This means that employees could continue to access information even once they have left the company.

Despite the spate of embarrassing data losses by the Government in recent months, the results also show that companies continue to distribute sensitive information in unsafe ways.

Over a third of companies still email confidential data from place to place, while another third send it on physical mediums via courier firms.