Your Fired Employees Are Stealing Your Data

from the taking-more-than-a-stapler dept

It probably shouldn't come as a big surprise that a new study says 60 percent of employees keep corporate data after they leave a job. The most common types of retained data are things like contact lists and non-financial information, with the ex-employees usually thinking it will help them in their next job. While this sort of stat will probably get blamed on the state of the economy, it's likely that rising unemployment probably only exacerbates it. A more worrying stat from the study is that a quarter of respondents said they were able to access data on their former employers' computer networks after they left the company. This corresponds to earlier research saying that "malicious insider" attacks are on the rise as the number of disgruntled employees and ex-employees grows. With so many companies focused on cutting costs by reducing headcount, effective data security could also fall by the wayside.

Filed Under: data theft, employees