WFH Security – Data Breaches Challenges Surging as Employees Abandoning Safety

The necessary shift to work from home is bringing more security challenges
and an increase in data loss for organizations.

The widespread shift for work from home poses new security challenges for organizations.
The traditional security systems are failing to curb the privacy issues of accidental data loss
and insider threat. With the spike in remote working due to the COVID-19 crisis, nearly 48% of employees are less likely to tag onto safe data practices. The latest report from Tessian, titled “State of Data Loss Prevention 2020” revealed this and many more such insights.

Isolated work culture is compounding more insider threats than ever. Nearly 84 % of IT
security professionals reported that data loss prevention is becoming more difficult in the
current situation. Due to this, more than half of surveyed employees (58%) indicated their
information feels less secure. Nearly 52% of employees reported they might get away with
riskier behavior, and about 48% reported that “not being watched by IT” is a reason for
ignoring safe data practices. Another 47% of the surveyed respondents believe they are
“being distracted”.

However, about 91% of the IT leaders noted that they trust their employees in following the right security practices when working in a scattered manner. And another 84% also reported that data loss prevention is trickier when people work from different regions. Furthermore, many workers believe that security policies could be a barrier – with 51% saying the security policies impede their productivity and another 54% need to find an interim solution if security policies prevent them from doing their work.

About 30% of the data breaches involve internal resources that expose company
information as a result of malicious or negligent acts. Basically, data loss and insider threats over an email are particularly challenging for IT leaders to manage with the lack of visibility of the risk. Some of the primary findings from the report are:

a] The US workers are more than twice as likely as UK workers (72% vs. 31%) – in
sending emails to the wrong person
b] IT leaders in US companies with more than 1,000 employees projected that around
480 emails are sent to the wrong person per year. However, Tessian data reveals
that people send at least 800 wrong emails per year – that is 1.6x more than the
above estimation.
c] Nearly 34% of employees usually take company documents with them when they
leave the job.
d] Employees from the US are 2x more likely to send company data into their personal
emails in comparison to UK employees (82% vs. 35%).

A data breach is pervasive – if people abandon security elements.
Tim Sadler, CEO at Tessian, has mentioned in the company blog post, “Businesses have
adapted quickly to the abrupt shift to remote working. The challenge they now face is
protecting data from risky employee behaviors as working from home becomes the
norm. Human error is the biggest threat to companies’ data security, and IT teams lack true visibility of the threat. Business leaders need to address security cultures and adopt
advanced solutions to prevent employees from making costly mistakes that result in data
breaches and non-compliance.”