Increasingly, it’s insiders who are stealing their organizations’ information, according to recent studies.

Insiders were responsible for almost 25% of all known data breaches in financial institutions last year, according to a recent study sponsored by Cisco and conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center.

Verizon Business’ 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report attributes at least 20% of all 2008 data breaches to insiders. Insider data breaches are more damaging because an insider data breach involves the loss or exposure of 100,000 records on average. The total number of records lost to insiders in 2008 was more than 1.33 million, according to the report.

The most obvious reason employees are stealing information is that they can. A survey of nearly 1,000 people who’d been laid-off or fired revealed that 85% of employers failed to perform an audit of hard copy or electronic data employees left with when terminated or laid off.

Not surprisingly, the Ponemon Institute survey also found that 60% of the respondents said they stole customer information, contact lists, employee records, financial reports and more when they left. As well, 24% of them said they were still able to electronically access their former employers’ data months after leaving.

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A recent study by the Ponemon Institute and Absolute Software Corp. revealed that 56% of business managers had disabled their computers’ encryption. Adding to the impact, 92% of IT security professionals said someone in their organization has lost their laptop or had it stolen. In 71% of those incidents, a data breach resulted.

The findings of this study echo those reported earlier this month by Verizon Business. Their data breach study found that 67% of the data breaches occurring in 2008 were aided by significant employee error; 83% were of no, low or moderate difficult; 81% of victim organizations were not Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant.

While these revelations go a long way toward explaining the 285,000,000 records compromised in data breaches last year, they don’t explicitly prescribe means of identity theft protection for consumers, in what is obviously a Wild West zeitgeist.

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