arstechnica.com — Much security coverage focuses on malware, hackers, and the dangers both pose to unwary companies, but there's evidence to suggest the problem lies a good deal closer to home. How close? Try one cubicle over.
Oct 12, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountOct 13, 2008
Sometime last year it came out that data belonging to our provincial government (I think they were employee records or something along those lines) had been released to a third party due to some employee installing Bearshare on there PC and having the C drive shared. There was a bit of a ruckus kicked up over it. I was working IT for a department of the government at the time and it honestly did not surprise me. You can have all the security in the world, but if the ones with access to the information are idiots then it is useless.
crossmrOct 13, 2008
That's not quite true. The largest individual cause of loss is employees (last time I worked at that kind of place I was told around 36%, that was a few years ago). That means 64% comes from somewhere else, just no single source.
digitexOct 13, 2008
Employees indeed are the real "hackers". But employer still needs them, too bad.
secrityOct 13, 2008
I was describing the shop where I am currently the chief sys admin. We run weekly full and daily incremental disk backups to tape and we have a mirrored DR site. The dba's do Oracle database backups daily, and at least one of the databases runs backups every six hours; and we can do some database recovery things with the SAN.
synagenceOct 13, 2008
Ok ... didn't mean they lost the data forever ... but they caused a major recovery to be necessary .. which leads to outages and lost $$$