Employee leaks are most significant data threat

McAfee has a new survey out that found the most significant threat to businesses is data that is leaked accidentally or intentionally by employees. In addition to that the survey also found that companies were reluctant to report data breaches because of the impact to their reputation, and 1 in 10 said they would not report a breach unless legally required to (like in California).

The threat from data leakage is one that's been around for a while, but is probably even more prevalent now that the web is such a ubiquitous tool in most organizations. Many employees don't think twice about using the web as part of their day to day operations.

The question is how does an organization protect themselves from this threat while still providing access to the web. The answer of course is the web proxy. It serves the important purpose of protecting web surfers from malware coming in from the web, but it can also be used to monitor outbound data to the web, to help prevent accidental or intentional data leakage through the web. Many DLP vendors integrate with the proxy through ICAP, so there's no reason you can't have an easy to deploy DLP solution in your network today.