Why ex-employees are a data security menace
October 20, 2014 12:53 PM
How much access?
About 89% of ex-employees retained access to at least one login and password for such services as Salesforce, PayPal, SharePoint, Facebook, Basecamp, Shopify, Desk.com, Office 365, Google Apps, Mail Chimp and Wordpress, among other corporate applications.
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
Sobering numbers
The survey was conducted in August 2014 and involved 379 respondents who had left a company within the past six months. Twenty-four percent of respondents when surveyed still had access to a PayPal account used in their previous employment, 21% still had Facebook access and 18% had access to LinkedIn. Forty-nine percent had logged into an account after leaving the company and 45% retained access to confidential or highly confidential data.
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
Security holes
Why all the access? Sixty percent of respondents were not asked for their cloud logins during the exit interview. "It's not surprising that cloud apps are falling through the cracks during the employee off-boarding process," according to the report. "In many companies, the responsibility for provisioning apps falls to different departments. Email is provided by IT, payroll apps are provisioned by HR, and line-of-business apps are provisioned by department managers. With this approach, there is no clear responsibility for decommissioning and deprovisioning. The result: rampant rogue access."
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
Walking away with files
Sixty-eight percent of surveyed ex-employees stored work files in personal cloud storage and 88% of them retain access to file sharing services they used at the old job. Personal clouds reduce corporate red tape and improve productivity, but the company's IT department doesn't know where company data is, much less control what ex-employees can access.
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
Corporate risk
The risks of rogue access include stolen secrets, lost data, regulatory noncompliance, problems conducting e-discovery, sabotage and hacking, among others. Ask yourself this question: What if the bad guys nab an ex-employee's device -- with all the passwords to your systems stored in plain text?
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
An Intermedia white paper with a checklist and best practices for preventing rogue access is available here.
[Image: Fotolia]
[Image: Fotolia]
