An organisation is far more likely to be become a victim of data theft from within, than from external threats.
Insiders remain a significant threat to your organization’s sensitive data. In fact, an Experian Annual Data Breach Forecast suggests that employee mistakes are one of the top threats to companies. Insider data theft may be due to a malicious employee taking or selling your corporate data or simply making an unintentional mistake. Rather than react after sensitive data is lost, your organization should take proactive steps to mitigate the risk of insider data theft.
There are a number of ways in which the theft of internal data can take place without trace. Historically a rogue employee may place data on a USB Stick or email data to a personal email account. But USB drives are easy to disable and emails to personal accounts can be tracked or blocked.
Shadow IT, as it is now known, allows employees with internet access to use free cloud based software, outside of the control of the organisation. In these instances, free cloud based transfer applications often don’t get taken into consideration. For example, something like the Free version of WeTransfer facilitates the removal of data with ease and without trace.
With such threats ever growing, it may soon be common place for IT to restrict access to such sites in order to control and monitor data flowing in and out of the organisation.
With this being the case, if you do need to transfer data externally, you should consider alternative methods that allow full visibility of data movements, such as dataXchange.