IT employees spy on colleagues

Over one-third of professional information technology employees use passwords to access private data, such as board-meeting minutes and details of colleagues’ salaries, a new survey shows. The new Cyber-Ark survey, which questioned over 400 IT professionals in the US and Britain, also found that 74% of respondents could access data that is not relevant to their position.

“Employee snooping on sensitive information continues unabated,” said Udi Mokady, chief executive of Cyber-Ark. “While seemingly innocuous, (unmanaged privileged) accounts provide workers with the ‘keys to the kingdom,’ allowing them to access critically sensitive information,” Mokady said.

Cyber-Ark said that the most common pieces of data accessed by employees without the appropriate clearance were human relations databases, customer information, lists with names proposed for redundancies and marketing information.