Most Employees Think It’s the Company’s Job to Secure Their Work Accounts

• 59% of employed Americans are more concerned about creating a strong password for personal accounts than work accounts
• 70% of remote workers don’t consider it their responsibility to keep their corporate account secure
• Organizations are behind in educating their employees on the risks associated with a compromised corporate account
• Human Risk Analytics enables IT admins to stay afloat of insider threats

Americans are fairly content with remote-work policies. While they appreciate earning back their commute time and the ability to run errands during work hours, they are not so inclined to respect corporate security policies, often bypassing their company’s defenses to mask their activities. Still, most of them would blame their company if their work accounts got hacked, according to a new study.

2020 brought to light – or, better yet, shed more light on – a worrying fact about remote workers’ habits relative to corporate security. Employees often break security policy intentionally to mask their online activities, and they even lend their company-issued laptops to family members for personal use.

According to a recent study, 61% of IT security leaders say remote workers have caused a data breach this year.

Now, a survey by The Harris Poll (sponsored by Dashlane) brings more bad news for organizations relying on work-from-home into 2021: 70% of Americans currently working remotely believe it is their company's job to make sure their work accounts aren't hacked or breached.

This is a worrying misconception, suggesting organizations have a ways to go to educate their employees on the risks associated with a compromised corporate account.

“Any information leaked online makes it easier for companies to be hacked, which can have serious consequences for breached businesses,” according to the research. “The average cost of a data breach in 2020 is $3.86 million, which jumps to $8.64 million when looking at the U.S. alone.This doesn't take into account the devastating effect a security failure can have on brand perception, which can take years of hard, humbling work to recover from.”

Other key findings include:

• 59% of employed Americans are more concerned about creating a strong password for personal accounts than work accounts
• 22%reuse passwords from their personal accounts for their online work accounts
• Over two-thirds of employed Americans say they are sure some of their personal information has been compromised (i.e. in a data breach)

In a bid to address the growing insider-threat problem, Bitdefender this year added Human Risk Analytics to its GravityZone endpoint security platform.

HRA supplements existing risk analytics capabilities and factors in potentially dangerous actions into an organization’s overall risk score.

GravityZone checks for misconfigured settings in operating systems and applications, but also looks at signs of human-generated risk, like recycling old passwords or downloading unsanctioned software. IT admins enjoy a centralized management console that offers a more holistic picture of their company’s security posture while also highlighting who needs security training. Learn more here.