Ride the Lightning

83% of Employees Access Former Employers’ Accounts

February 22, 2022

Help Net Security reported on February 21 that, in a recent study, the digital identity firm Beyond Identity collected responses from former employees across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland and found that 83% of employees admitted to maintaining continued access to accounts from a previous employer. The general cybersecurity threat this presents is coupled with the rather astonishing fact that 56% of these employees said they had used this continued access with the specific intent of causing harm to their former employer.

When the survey focused specifically on responses from managers and business leaders, 74% admitted their company had been negatively impacted by a former employee breaching their cybersecurity.

The most common infractions included logging into corporate social media (36%), looking through company emails (32%), and taking company files and documents (31%). More than one in four former employees logged in to the back end of the company’s website.

The survey found the obvious solution to stopping the actions of these former employees.  A professional, detailed offboarding process would accomplish two critical things – preventing unauthorized access by former employees by eliminating their passwords and other insecure authentication methods, and simultaneously generating goodwill, lessening the desire to harm a former employer.

Frankly, though it’s nice to generate goodwill, companies are often terminating people – so I would rely heavily on taking measures that would prevent access to their former employers’ networks.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225, Fairfax, VA 22030
Email: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com
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