Careless users cause data loss incidents

A new study from Proofpoint shows that 85 percent of organizations polled experienced at least one data loss incident in the past year. Even the country with the lowest percentage -- the UK -- still had 73 percent of respondents reporting at least one incident in the past 12 months.

What's particularly interesting though is that careless users, accounting for 70.6 percent, are much more likely to cause these incidents than compromised (48.1 percent) or misconfigured systems (45.3 percent).

"This research illuminates the most critical aspect of the data loss problem: its human causes," says Ryan Kalember, chief strategy officer at Proofpoint. "Careless, compromised, and malicious users are and will continue to be responsible for the vast majority of incidents, all while GenAI tools are absorbing common tasks -- and gaining access to confidential data in the process. Organisations need to rethink their DLP strategies to address the underlying cause of data-loss -- people's actions -- so they can detect, investigate, and respond to threats across all channels their employees are using including cloud, endpoint, email, and web."

For most organizations, only one percent of users are responsible for 88 percent of alerts. While this might imply that the risk is contained, the reality isn't quite that simple. In a modern workplace, with employees regularly joining, leaving and changing jobs, and circumstances
constantly shifting, the identity of this one percent is likely to change from month to month.

One of the most common manifestations of user carelessness is misdirected email. With most webmail and native email clients offering address autofill, it's easy for users in a hurry to make
mistakes. According to 2023 data from Tessian, which Proofpoint acquired last fall, the problem is widespread. About a third of users sent about two emails per year to the wrong recipient. That means a business of 5,000 employees can expect to deal with around 3,400 misdirected emails per year.

The full report is available from the Proofpoint site.

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