• Ars Technica, Monday, October 13, 2008 10:15 AM

Worried that your company's data isn't totally secure from outside threats? Stop worrying. It's not the outside threats you need to be afraid of. According to a new study, your own employees are much more likely to be the cause of any data breach.

The newly released Compuware study says that only 1% of data theft this past year was the result of outside hackers. Instead, negligent employees are to blame when data falls into the wrong hands, as well as outsourced and disgruntled workers. Even scarier, 79% of the 1,112 IT workers surveyed say their company had experienced a data breach in the past 12 months.

Overall, the study reveals that IT workers have very low confidence in their company's ability to protect against data breaches--perhaps not surprising given the high rate of incident. And don't expect them to take the lead in fixing the problem. While many reported tackling the technical causes of the breaches, few if any considered it their jobs to deal with the root cause: namely, negligent employees.

Read the whole story at Ars Technica »