A company’s biggest security threat isn’t the sinister hacker trying to break into the corporate network, but employees and partners with easy access to company information.
Just ask Apple Computer, which filed two lawsuits in December accusing insiders and partners of leaking proprietary information. In one case, Apple is suing two men it says distributed prerelease versions of Tiger, the next iteration of Mac OS X. In a separate action, it is suing unnamed individuals who leaked details about a forthcoming music device code-named Asteroid.
Apple’s not the only company that’s found sensitive internal information leaked to the public. Big names such as America Online, Microsoft and Cisco Systems have also been victims. Research indicates that most security breaches are inside jobs. A recent Ponemon Institute survey of 163 Fortune 1000 companies found that roughly 70 percent of all reported security breaches were due to insiders.
“It’s much more glamorous to think of the hacker who works for some large cyber-crime ring,” said Larry Ponemon, head of the Tuscon, Ariz., think tank. “But in reality, those characters only make up a small percent of the problem.”
For more than a decade, corporations have erected digital perimeters to keep outsiders off their networks. But now discontented, reckless and greedy employees, and disgruntled former workers, can all be bigger threats than the mysterious hacker. And as more companies outsource portions of their business, vital company information can easily fall into the wrong hands.
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