SECURITY -The Threat from Within

Even the best virus protection and network security won’t shield your company from a virus if one of your employees downloads it intentionally. While any company can be the target of internal sabotage, a recent survey of security and HR execs by risk management consultancy Risk Control Strategies shows that companies with between 500 and 900 employees are the most at risk: twenty-three percent of those companies have been victimized by internal sabotage through virus downloads in the past two years.

But even if you pull a Trump and fire troublesome employees, the threat won’t go away. According to a recent study by the U.S. Secret Service and CERT, which analyzed 49 cases of insider computer sabotage, most incidents were carried out via remote access, and less than half of the saboteurs had authorized access at the time of the incident. The report concludes: “The power of a terminated employee with system administrator access should not be underestimated.”