The 21st century hacker: the dissatisfied employee

Information attacks are initiated by political motivated persons or by industrial thieves, right? In fact, 70% of the attacks are coming from inside the company.

Article Translated by:
NiC Translation Agency

Employees are responsible for almost one third of the loss of data from the financial institutions.

Increasingly more business taking place in a computerized environment, and companies should be increasingly worried about the 21^st century hacker - unhappy employees, said Rich Brewer, an analyst of International Data Corp. (IDC).

Most informatics thefts take place because of a reduced level of security inside the network, which allows employees to copy and trade spheres confidential data without problems on the external environment, such as stick-ROMs or USB CD-ROMs. "Hackers take advantage of the fact that companies do not report these events," said Brewer. According to the FBI, less than 10% of online attacks were reported last year, he added.

Companies recognize that data theft is a problem

Two on-line surveys, one conducted by KPMG and the other by Deloitte & Touche, have shown the concern for the lack of IT security networks, the companies recognizing that the international threat, or from some employees who steal data or some who are simply negligent, is as big as that of hackers coming from the outside. The KPMG study, made up of 1300 members of audit committees from various companies in 25 countries, has revealed that one third are dissatisfied because of the attention their companies provide for security networks, with only 6 of 10 people "somewhat satisfied". Nearly two-thirds of the financial services surveyed by Deloitte said they had been compromised by hackers, all stating that they observed an increase in investment security of the information system. It is worrying, but almost one third of these data losses were due to employees, either by willfully violating the law, either by omission or unintentional errors.

Most financial institutions asked (91%) have said that at this moment they are very worried about the increasing attacks from inside the company.

The companies are the most targeted by hackers

According to the Organization “Identity Theft Resource Center”, more than 36% of the attacks carried out this year were directed at the company, while the educational institutions are located on the 2nd place, with 21%. According to the organization, approximately 13.4% of the attacks took place outside, being competed for attacks from the inside (16.5%). Stolen laptops and other digital media have meant only 20% of data loss.

How to disable USB drives

A widely used method for employees to transfer sensitive information on computers is the company's USB stick.

A solution to prevent this is to block the installation of the USB drives. A very quick way to do this in Windows is to click Start -> Run and run the Registry editor "regedit". Then, using the rolled editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> USBSTOR and change the "start" giving them the "4" value. To return to the initial configuration and re-activate the USB drives, reset the "start", giving him the "3" value. The operation does not require restart.