A recent survey in the largest tech countries showed that 20% of employees at a private company would sell their password for the right price. Half of them would accept a reward of around 900 euros.
Insider threats continue to be one of the highest risks for today's companies, and a recent study from SailPoint demonstrates why management doesn't trust its staff.
SailPoint, a Texas-based technology company, conducted the survey, asking about 1,000 employees at private companies in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. This is the second year in a row that SailPoint has conducted the study, and the numbers are up from last year.
The responses to this year's survey revealed that, globally, one in five employees would be willing to sell their corporate password for the right price (last year the figure was one in seven).
Worryingly, some employees wouldn't even bother to negotiate a good price; 44% of the 20% who said they were willing to sell their password would not ask for more than $1,000 (or €900).
Also, 65% of all respondents stated that they use the same corporate password for various company applications they work with, which means that if a password is leaked, it could cause damage to multiple parts of a company's activity.
Another strange phenomenon observed by the survey is that some employees will not even need to sell their own password, because 32% said they share their corporate password with other colleagues, and thus an unscrupulous employee could very easily sell the password and avoid criminalization in the event of a data breach.
It’s also ironic that SailPoint asked employees for their thoughts on data breaches that include their own information. As you might expect, they wouldn’t like it if their data was leaked. 85% of employees said they would react very negatively if their personal information in the company’s data was breached by another company, while 84% said they were concerned about their sensitive data being leaked to them.
Now you know why a company's management ranks its employees as the most dangerous factor when it comes to data breaches.
