Cost of carelessness hits the CIO's budget

David Perry, global director of education for Trend Micro, tells Forbes that as many as one in five virus infections come from users who purposefully infect themselves out of curiosity. This is just one of the many practices that undermine information technology security due to varying combinations of naiveté and carelessness. This is why CIOs plan to spend 20 percent more on preventing data theft and intrusion during the next year, according to research by the market analysis firm InsightExpress. Analysts noted that about 30 percent of non-IT corporate employees violate the terms of security agreements that they sign. It's a phenomenon that appears to be global in nature, since the study included respondents from professionals in seven different countries.

A second study, commissioned by Cisco Systems and the National Cyber Security Alliance, also shows that more than 60 percent of employees sometimes use mobile devices without encrypted or password-protected data to connect to their organization's network, and more than a third sometimes work by piggybacking on strangers' wireless Internet connections. So while many employees are asked to stay connected at home or on weekends, they may be putting their networks at extreme risk by exposing all of their data on unsecured networks. Trend Micro released a report that says that U.S. and U.K. workers on corporate laptops are more than twice as likely to send confidential info via instant message, compared with desktop users. They are also a third more likely to send confidential data over webmail.

For all the details on security:
- read the article in Forbes