Senior Managers Are the Worst Information Security Offenders

An anonymous reader writes "As companies look for solutions to protect the integrity of their networks, data centers, and computer systems, an unexpected threat is lurking under the surface — senior management. According to a new survey, 87% of senior managers frequently or occasionally send work materials to a personal email or cloud account to work remotely, putting that information at a much higher risk of being breached. 58% of senior management reported having accidentally sent the wrong person sensitive information (PDF), compared to just 25% of workers overall."

Comments

Seen it on the job:

[Hartree]

This is supposed to be some great revelation?

They're also the ones who can get security policy overridden so that something can be easy for them. Regardless of the problems.

Re:Seen it on the job:

[MickyTheIdiot]

In Indiana an admin can be held legally responsible if their network isn't properly secure. I understand what you are saying here, but there are professional and sometimes legal reasons something is more secure than an exec wants.

And while I agree you have your paranoid admins, most admins are struggling just to do basic security that no admin would consider controversial. Like someone else already said... there are many, many papertrails out there so that an admin can show that they attempted to do basic security but they couldn't do it because some big fish in a little pond wanted to be sure he could telnet in from bolivia.

Re:anybody on a Helldesk can testify to this

[cusco]

Having to unblock AOL so that the marketing exec could send/receive company documents to his personal email account was annoying. The subsequent flood of spam was the only thing that let my boss get away with blocking AOL again. The marketing exec was surprised at our reaction, he just thought that was the way email systems were supposed to be.

This was the same idiot who needed his laptop reinstalled three times in four months when he installed the latest version of AOL's client software the same day it was released.