Employees are biggest security threat in UK, says Oracle

The survey found that:

• Internal security breaches present the largest threat to compromising data. More than half (51%) of companies say that they felt internal security breaches were a bigger threat to business than external.
• Smaller companies were much more conscious of the internal threat than larger companies.
• 27% of respondents stated that concerns over security had prevented them granting external customers, suppliers or partners access to their web site.
• 33% of companies cited the loss of customer confidence as the most damaging aspect of a security breach. Downtime and loss of commercially sensitive information (both 23%) were selected as the next most important. Credibility (14%) and loss of revenue (7%) were selected as the least important factors.
• 52% of companies still find it difficult to keep their data secure while only 15% think it is not difficult to safeguard information.

Chris Baker, a vice president of e-business at Oracle said:

"People are naturally curious, and if they know confidential information is stored on the network, some of them are going to try to access it. The question is, how easy you are making it for them to do so?"

"Simple measures such as encryption and password protection are often sufficient to keep data secure, however 90% of the time businesses will not put these safeguards in place because of drains on performance or other similarly weak excuses."

Security companies are today warning that a malicious internet worm known as Klez.E is set to trigger today. The code will try to overwrite files on infected computers, which is potentially more harmful than deleting documents because deleted documents are often more easily be recovered.