Washington state attorney general Rob McKenna has called for all organizations, both private and public, to do more to protect their data against internal theft. Currently, Washington rates as the 7th-worst state in the US for data theft, with 1 in 9 residents affected by identity theft in 2005.
According to McKenna: “We’re urging any owner of data… to take better care of that information, to step up their security efforts, because we do know that a certain number of ID thefts are perpetrated by people working on the inside.”
In addition to better security and criminal checks on new joiners, organizations need to carefully consider how to balance the need to make data accessible to employees with the risks of that data being exposed to unauthorized parties outside the network. With USB sticks and other portable devices being increasingly cited in data theft cases, an obvious starting point is to control the presence of these (often personally-owned) devices on the corporate network.
