Access Control
& Security Systems

Eighty percent of the network security managers surveyed at last month's Gartner Information Security Conference in Chicago claim their biggest security threat comes from their own employees. Results show 58 percent of those surveyed claim the careless use of personal communications by their employees pose the most dangerous security risk to their networks. Meanwhile, 22 percent point to deliberate insider breaches as their biggest concern.

The majority of the same information security experts surveyed claim that more than 50 percent of security breaches are caused by personal use of work computers. Personal e-mails and instant messaging (IM) are two of the biggest culprits.

The risks that IM poses are broad, including unauthenticated senders using tactics to trick unsuspecting users to the routine disclosure of confidential information. Monitoring of communications and filtering of potentially risky services such as IM are difficult tasks due to the ever-changing communications models used by IM clients, according to Jerry Brady, chief technology officer at Guardent Inc., Waltham, Mass., a managed security services provider (MSSP), that administered the survey.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue