When employees leave, is your data walking out the door?

2021-12-29 05:30

Data exfiltration often rises alongside resignations because more employees are misappropriating data and they're doing so around the time they resign.

A Tessian study confirmed this, finding that 45 per cent of employees admit to downloading, saving or sending work data out of network before leaving their jobs.

The same tools can be used to investigate unintentional data leakage incidents, such as an employee uploading work documents to a personal cloud storage account to continue a project from home or sending an email containing data to the wrong recipient.

File and folder names can easily be changed to disguise the data within and so this data point alone won't prove any wrongdoing.

Before HR and legal teams meet with the suspect, it's important to remember that some employees don't realize that downloading confidential data and departing an organization with it is a crime.

Depending on the results of the investigation, organizations may wish to take a different course of action with these employees than with those who clearly tried to cover their tracks or were caught negotiating a sale of the data they stole and very clearly knew the gravity of their actions.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/12/29/insider-activity/