Ride the Lightning

Millennials Pose The Greatest Internal Risk to Businesses

November 3, 2015

Is anyone really surprised by the title of this post?

I certainly wasn't surprised by the SC Magazine article reporting on the findings in a report by cloud company Intermedia. Specifically, millennial IT professionals (18-34) who have worked at a single employer for seven years or more pose the greatest internal risk to their company's security, according to the report.

Intermedia surveyed 2,000 office workers in the U.S. and the U.K. Intermedia's 2015 Insider Risk Report found 37 percent of employees who have worked at their company for at least seven years admit to using hard copies to store their passwords. The report also found 42 percent of these employees use personal passwords for business applications.

40% of the IT millennials think it's ok to install applications without consulting anyone. 65% share logons with multiple users. 28% have accessed systems belonging to previous employees after leaving the company (this made me wonder about the data security practices of their former employers). 28% admit saving company files to personal cloud storage. 44% would copy confidential data from their current employer before starting a new job.

A recent study conducted by Atomik Research found that millennial consumers are not confident in the security of their data. They say they want to be trained but they don't want the training to be boring. Interactive training seems to be gaining in popularity. I'm pretty sure some company is not only spending money on outside security trainers but also offering iPads to those who can spot phishing e-mails faster than their peers. Because millennials not only dislike boring, they like to win things too – especially Apple things.

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