Someone's Peering at Your Personal Data and You Problably Know Him

Posted 06/23/2008 at 7:51am | by Paul Lilly

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Hop online without the aid of a firewall and you may find your PC
flooded with malware in only a few short minutes. Just clicking on a
malicious link can be enough to infect your rig with a virus. Internet
bad guys from the around the globe are constantly on the prowl for
vulnerable machines waiting to be hacked, and once inside, these
anonymous crooks have free reign over your personal sensitive data. But
it's not just international eyes that you need to be worried about, and
the person peering at your data may be closer than you think.

How close? Maybe in the same building. According to new survey, one in three IT administrators admitted to using top-level admin passwords to poke around confidential or sensitive information at their workplace. This scary statistic comes courtesy of Cyber-Ark, a Massachusetts based security software company focused on enterprise networks, who polled 300 senior IT professionals at a London security conference and trade show. Even scarier, when IT workers were quizzed on what three things they would take if they were told they would be fired the next day, privileged passwords ranked as one of the top two vote getters, right behind customer database. This doesn't mean you need to whip out the aluminum foil deflector beanie, but you should take care to store sensitive information where only you have access to it.