IDC warns of internal cyber security threat

IDC has warned businesses that the greatest cyber security threat they face is not from exterior hacker attacks but from their own employees.

The IDC white paper, Delivering the Value of IT: Security as a Strategic Priority, revealed that 90 per cent of breaches in security originate from within the company. The main sources for such breaches are spiteful employees.

The report found that all the large European companies questioned had experienced security breaches and that the vast multi-platform nature of networks was perceived as a significant security problem by staff managing them.

Martin Canning, analyst at IDC, said: 'The popular image of the threat to network security is that of the whizz kid hacker seeking to steal data, crash systems or deface Websites. Yet enterprises are much more vulnerable to internal security breaches, caused by accident or malicious activities.'

Stefan McKenzie, security product manager at Tivoli, said: 'The mixture of hardware and soft-ware environments in organisations make the task of security management complicated and time consuming. With the high cost of IT personnel, organisations are beginning to recognise that their staff are not as scalable as their systems.'

The lack of trust in IT was further highlighted by a report from Neopost that questioned 800 companies from the UK, France, Germany and the US. The report revealed that a third of the respondents were concerned about the security of email and that in the UK, 90 per cent of businesses still send important documents by traditional post.