Careless employees remain the biggest security threat in 2016, study shows

Negligent or careless employees who don’t follow security policies are the biggest threat to endpoint security in organizations, according to a recent survey.

Eighty-one percent of respondents say the biggest challenge is minimizing the threat of negligent or careless employees, from 78 percent in 2015. Since 2013, the percentage of respondents who say threats caused by malware infections that are stealthier and difficult to detect increased from 32 percent to 56 percent. The threat caused by the growing number of insecure mobile devices in the workplace increased from 33 percent to 50 percent.

Employees’ use of mobile devices and commercial cloud applications continues to increase endpoint risk significantly. Similar to last year’s findings, respondents report the use of commercial cloud applications (72 percent), BYOD (69 percent), and employees who operate from home offices and offsite locations (62 percent) have significantly increased endpoint risk.

Mobile devices, vulnerabilities in third-party applications and malicious insider risks have increased significantly since the study was first conducted in 2011. Despite the risk of mobile devices, 56 percent of respondents say their employees are allowed to use personal devices to connect to the network, survey shows.

Ponemon Institute surveyed 694 US IT and IT security practitioners who are involved in endpoint security in a variety of organizations.