Insiders are most often responsible for data loss

IT managers see insider threat as the biggest danger when it came to data loss within corporate networks (54 percent), according to a survey by Imperva.

Far fewer respondents took the chance to blame anyone at all (25 percent), and even less believed that hackers were primarily responsible for data theft incidents (21 percent).

Another result showed that 70 percent of respondents were not planning to outsource mission-critical or sensitive data, as part of a cloud-project to an external service provider, over the next twelve months.

Analysis of data security incidents by Imperva in the past year showed that IT security managers will have to face 2011 with challenges in three key areas:

1. The protection of mobile devices will play a more important role. Providing more complex identification and authentication solutions for mobile devices will become a particular area of focus due to the expected increase in the volume of mobile malware attacks.

2. A late reaction. Companies will start to move part of their data storage and applications to the Cloud, culminating in the gradual establishment of Cloud-based data security solutions by the end of 2011.

3. Possible increase in the State support of cyber-attacks such as Stuxnet will build on the concepts and techniques of the commercial hacking industry; thus an increase in unnoticed and ongoing spy networks (Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)) will be made possible.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, said: “We expect, in the coming months, clearly different threat scenarios that will provide data security managers with a number of major challenges. The biggest potential danger is posed by the growing proliferation of advanced mobile devices used to access corporate networks. I expect that we will, next year, see the first major data security incident that will be caused by such high-risk devices. In addition, incidents which are based on advanced techniques for permanent spying networks will become an increasingly major problem to businesses – political and financial gain being the most prominent driving forces of these issues.”