Survey Finds Human Error As Biggest Security Risk

Feb 12, 2009 9:52 AM

According to Deloitte's 6th annual Global Security Survey, people are the problem when it comes to keeping things secure.

"[P]eople continue to be an organization's greatest asset as well as its greatest worry," Adel Melek, global leader of security and privacy services at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said in the report. "That has not changed from 2007. What has changed is the environment. The economic meltdown was not at its peak when respondents took this survey. If there was ever an environment more likely to facilitate an organization's people being distracted, nervous, fearful, or disgruntled, this is it. To state that security vigilance is even more important at a time like this is an understatement."

According to InformationWeek, Deloitte's survey, drawn from major financial companies around the globe, focuses on governance, investment, risk, use of security technologies, quality of operations and privacy. It includes some good news -- external breaches have declined sharply over the past year -- and troublesome news -- fewer companies say they have the commitment and funding to address regulatory compliance.

In terms of risk, specifically information systems failure, people are identified as the most significant vulnerability. "Human error is overwhelmingly stated as the greatest weakness this year (86 percent), followed by technology (a distant 63 percent)," the report states. It attributes the rising risk to increased adoption of new technologies and social networking.

In 2008, data breaches caused by human error declined, the Identity Theft Resource Center said to InformationWeek. Nonetheless, such breaches accounted for 35.2 percent of incidents with reported causes.

Survey respondents cited viruses and works, e-mail attacks and phishing/pharming as the most common cause of repeated occurrences of external breaches. But organizations are improving dealing with these threats because the percentage of companies reporting repeated incidents arising from these causes fell last year.

External breaches arising from viruses and worms affected 15 percent of respondents in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007; external breaches arising from e-mail attacks affected 24 percent of respondents in 2008 and 57 percent in 2007; breaches arising from phishing/pharming affected 7 percent in 2008 and 38 percent in 2007.

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