News released at Infosecurity Europe that 66 per cent of polled junior executives and IT staff would take confidential company information with them if they left their current employer raises one very obvious question: why only 66 per cent?
The findings came today in a survey from esteemed security software provider Cyber-Ark in its latest 'Trust, Security, and Passwords' survey. It found that most IT staff and 'C-level executives' (are there any other kind?) surveyed would 'definitely take confidential company information when they left their organisation'.
"Organisations could find themselves with their data walking out of the door and into the hands of the competition," says Cyber-Ark European VP Adam Bosnian - assuming that these departing self-confessed data filchers would not webmail it away, rather than risk detection by having it about their person as they stroll from the workplace for the last time.
Despite the 66 per cent of respondents who admit that they would take this information, both C-level professionals (93 per cent) and IT staff (86 per cent)  acknowledged that they 'have no right to these details' (87 per cent globally overall). This suggests that there remain around 10 per cent of the workforce who do claim co-ownership over the data they have worked on or are trusted with access to.
Such surveys are prone to overlooking the fact that today's mashup morals mean that many employees are inclined to take a 'proprietorial' interest in data sets they have worked on. The 'moral' relationship between employees and employers has altered radically in the last decade, to the point where self-interested staff see stealing data as 'payment in lieu' of that pay rise or promotion that never came through. 'As ye stuff, so shall ye be stuffed' is the ethic at work here.