
Overall 46 per cent said that if redundancies were rumoured they would try and find the list of staff to go and half of those would use their access rights to snoop around corporate servers or bribe a friend to do it for them, according to Cyber-Ark, which conducted the research.
More worryingly more than half of those questioned said that they had already taken commercially valuable corporate data from their workplace as a hedge against losing their jobs. In Holland the figure was as high as 78 per cent, with in the US 58 per cent and one in four British staff admitting to downloading data.
Adam Bosnian, vice president of Products, Strategy and Sales of Cyber-Ark says, “Employers have a right to expect loyalty from their workforce, however this works both ways and in these dark days, everyone is jittery especially with lay offs at the top of most corporate agendas - the instinct is to look out for number one.
“It would be unthinkable to leave money on a desk, an obvious temptation to anyone passing, instead it is always safely locked away and its time sensitive information is given the same consideration. Our advice is only allow access to sensitive information to those that really need it, lock it away in a digital vault and encrypt the really sensitive data.”
When it comes to locking down sensitive data the US is lagging badly. Barely a third of US workers reported that it was getting more difficult to steal data, compared to 46 per cent in Holland and 71 per cent in the UK.