The extent of the security threat posed by negligent employees has been exposed in a study by the Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon’s State of the Endpoint survey, which was backed by security vendor Lumension, quizzed more than 3,000 IT professionals in the UK, US, Germany and Australia.

Six out of 10 respondents said they lose sensitive data as a result of negligent employees, while nearly three in 10 have suffered malicious theft of sensitive data by employees.

This means the risk posed by insiders now rivals virus and malware intrusions as the primary cause of data breaches. Some 84 per cent reported suffering a virus or malware network intrusion in the past 12 months.

The report suggested the findings were hardly surprising given that 76 per cent of employees can email data out of their organisation and 70 per cent can download data onto a USB stick without detection. In contrast, more than three quarters of organisations have reactive anti-malware and anti-virus technologies in place.