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By Mark Henricks

Email remains the biggest security risk perceived by corporations, but Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like are not far behind, according to a survey of IT decision makers by email security firm Proofpoint. More than a third (35 percent) of companies surveyed in the June-July 2010 poll had investigated the exposure of confidential or proprietary information via email in the previous years, half had disciplined an employee for violating email policies and one in five had terminated an employee for email violations.

When it came to the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, 20 percent of the 261 ID decision makers surveyed had investigated loss of data via exposure social networking posts. The same percentage had disciplined an employee, and 7 percent had terminated someone. Most (53 percent) prohibit employee use of Facebook, and 31 percent outlaw LinkedIn.

One in six (17 percent) had investigated incidents involving short messaging services including Twitter. Nearly half (49 percent) prohibit Twitter usage. A similar number (18 percent) reported investigating YouTube and other media sharing sites as channels for data loss or exposure. Fifty-three percent don’t allow use of media-sharing sites, while 21 percent had disciplined employees and 9 percent of companies had terminated at least one employee for misusing such sites,

Despite the concern about network-related data loss, the largest rate of high concern (64 percent) was for physical loss of mobile devices such as laptops and smart phones. Twenty-two percent said they had looked into exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information because of lost stolen mobile devices or storage media in the past 12 months. And 56 percent were also highly concerned about losing data through mobile device emails.

Generally, responses indicated that data loss remains a significant threat. More than a third (36 percent) of organizations had experienced loss of sensitive or embarrassing information during the previous year. Nearly that many (31 percent) said they’d had customer information exposed or stolen during that time. And 29 percent said the same about intellectual property.

The survey, Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today’s Enterprise, 2010, is the seventh annual one Proofpoint has done on the topic.

Comments (1)

	1. 10-13-2010 19:22
	The fundamental problem with the social network and email data loss threats is that while policies help they can't instill good judgment; however, for some organizations, shutting off access to these tools equally destroys value. Registered

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