Worrying about outside hackers is one thing, but what happens when a disgruntled employee causes more damage to your business network than any malware could have? Recently, a company out of the Netherlands that provided web hosting, Verelox, had to shut down all of its services to their customers because an ex employee went into their system, deleted all customer data and wiped out most of their servers. Verelox quickly resolved their issues but many times, these situations do not have such a nice outcome.
So how can your business take proactive steps to prevent data breaches within your business? First thing is to make sure your company has set boundaries and understands what each employee can and cant have access to. Knowing your end users is extremely important because it allows you to control who is seeing your information. Backups are extremely important when controlling your network, in the case of Verelox, they had a system of backups in place that were regularly updated, so they restored their systems with the backups they had in place.
So how big of a threat is insider damage? More than you may think. According to a 2016 IBM study, internal employees are responsible for 60 percent of data breaches. From those, over 75% of breaches are done with a malicious intent and 25% were accidental. In a 2015 Biscom survey 1 in 4 people admitted to taking data from a company after they left. Many of them did not feel like it was wrong because they were items they created while they were working for that particular business. The most shocking statistic is that 95% of employees who took company data, said they would not even receive any repercussions because their employer did not have any policies to stop them.
For the 25% that caused a data breach by accident, they most likely fell victim to a phishing email or other internet malware attempt. Educating your end users could go a very long way for your business, and is one of the best proactive tools to keeping your company data secure. Many small businesses get hit the worst when a data breach occurs because they do not have the proper resources to manage their IT and keep on it all while trying to run and grow their business.