A third of companies believe their secrets have been stolen

Security expert Cyber-Ark has just conducted its fourth annual “Trust, Security and Passwords” survey.

And it’s revealed that there isn’t that much trust amongst the 400 IT administrators from across the UK and America that the company questioned.

35% of those surveyed believed that their firm’s sensitive data had been passed on to competitors at some point in the past.

Of those who thought this was the case, the majority – some 37% – said that the most likely cause of this secret divulging was disgruntled ex-employees. Sounds about right.

28% believed that human error was the root cause, while 10% thought a hack was to blame, and equally another 10% felt a lost laptop or mobile device was the problem.

When it comes to what sort of information was whispered in competitor’s ears, the most likely leak was that of the customer database, 26% said. 13% believed research and development plans were shared with the enemy.

In terms of year-on-year change, there was little alteration in the amount of folks who believed intellectual property had been stolen. Cyber-Ark says that this indicates organisations – it was mostly enterprise class companies who took part in the study – need to do more on the security front to protect themselves.

Cyber-Ark also made it clear that to address human error issues, firms should employ layers of control, with privileged access required for sensitive data to limit the chance of innocent and/or silly mistakes occurring.

The research also discovered that snooping is on the rise within companies, with 41% of respondents admitting they’d abused admin passwords to take a sneaky peek at confidential information.

That figure was up from 33% last year. In the US, the most tempting thing to snoop on turned out to be the customer database, whereas here in the UK, it was other people’s HR records. We’re evidently nosier than the Americans.

Another slightly worrying statistic the survey threw up was the fact that inside sabotage is on the up, from 20% last year to 27% this year.

Commenting on the results, Cyber-Ark’s Executive VP Americas and Corporate Development Adam Bosnian said: “It is the organization’s obligation to protect its sensitive information and intellectual property. Failing to do so, in our opinion, makes the company as bad as those who are abusing their privileged positions. Let’s face it, you might as well sell the information to the highest bidder yourself – that way at least you’ll have some control over who’s got it!”