As data loss continues to plague businesses, organisations should consider the necessity of multi-layer protection.
So says Petr Merkulov, chief product officer at Kaspersky Lab, who says, whatever the causes, data loss affects everybody - the company, its employees and even its customers.
According to a recent survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, customer information as well as financial data, both at 36%, are lost most often. This is closely followed by employee data, at 31%.
The causes of data leakage can be both external and internal. Thirty-five percent of IT specialists confirmed their companies had lost data due to malware infection - the most common external threat.
The next most common causes are e-mail-based attacks (21%) and phishing (17%). When it comes to internal threats, the loss of important data is most often caused by vulnerabilities in a company's software (25%), which cyber criminals exploit to infect victim computers, it adds.
The survey also discovered that a high proportion of data leaks were from mobile devices - 23% of respondents identified the loss of data and 15% the theft of a mobile device as the cause of a data breach.
In 13% of cases, important information fell into the wrong hands due to negligence, for example, sending messages to the wrong e-mail address, the study notes.
Merkulov points out that the range of cyber threats leading to data loss illustrates how important it is for every company to realise the necessity of multi-level protection.
"An effective corporate security solution must protect against both external and internal threats using the right tools for the job - anti-malware technologies, corporate security policies, data leakage prevention methods, control tools and many other features," he concludes.
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