Nearly half of agencies have been targeted by insider threats to their data within the last year and nearly a third of them actually had data taken by such intrusions, according to a study by a public-private partnership on government IT, MeriTalk.
The study involved a survey of 150 federal IT managers involved with cyber security efforts, and found that three-fourths of agencies are more focused on such threats than they were a year before.
It noted that many threats of data loss caused by insiders are unintentional, for reasons such as employees not following security protocols. In that vein, it said, “most could improve the personal touch when it comes to education. Just 39 percent offer in-person security training and only 29 percent update their security protocol manuals for employee review.”
Also, it found that nearly half of agencies cannot even tell if a record has been shared inappropriately or how it was shared, and a third “cannot tell what data has been lost.”
