Maurizio Taglioretti

In a Ponemon study, 74%  of respondents said they have access to customer contact lists, employee records, financial reports and other confidential information. To prevent unauthorized access to your sensitive data, there are a few essential best practices you should stick to:
Determine the level of access each individual has to critical data and make sure it matches the level of access they actually need. You don’t want a sales representative to have access to financial documents. Be sure to check everyone, including admins, users, contractors, partners and so on.
Establish and maintain a least-privilege access model. This limits the damage a user can do, either deliberately or accidentally. It also limits the reach of malware or an attacker who gets control of a user account.
The same Ponemon study says that 8% of respondents who changed or lost their jobs in the previous 12 months took confidential company data with them. More than half of respondents said they don’t see that as a crime. To make sure that doesn’t happen to your organization, you need to adhere to these employee offboarding best practices:
Disable the accounts of departing employees as soon as the person leaves. If the person is being fired, ideally you should disable the account while the meeting is happening. Also regularly look for accounts of users who have left the organization; if you find any that are still active, figure out why and fix the underlying processes. For instance, is IT team being notified when employees leave the company or contractors’ projects are completed? If not, the associated accounts can lie dormant, even though they still retain permissions to access systems and data. It’s relatively easy for a hacker to find inactive accounts to target — a quick search on LinkedIn or Twitter, for example, could reveal who’s recently left a company. Taking over a stale account is a great way for an intruder to quietly probe your network without raising any alerts.

Data-centric Security to Grow to USD 5.83 Billion by 2022