Free email services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail are being targeted left and right by enterprising hackers who are using social networking sites to steal login and password data to then access corporate data and applications.
As eSecurity Planet reports, webmail services are easy targets mainly because so many employees are using their personal email accounts for work purposes and companies largely do a poor job of implementing data loss prevention applications and policies to police their contents.
After reviewing significant data breaches that occurred at more than 10,000 enterprise customer sites, Awareness Technologies security team found that employees are responsible for the majority of these mishaps. And, according to IT security research firm Ponemon Institute, these incidents cost millions to resolve and do even more damage to a company’s reputation and brand.
Awareness Technologies found that most of the so-called “insider” breaches were a result of employees either being malicious, untrained or gullible enough to fall for a variety of socially engineered scams designed to gain access to their personal email accounts.
Sophisticated phishing campaigns, socially engineered malware scams and a never-ending barrage of new mobile devices and applications continue to torment enterprise IT security administrators, but it turns out that some of the most commonly used and seemingly innocuous applications are responsible for a growing number of data breaches.
According to a new report from on-demand security software vendor Awareness Technologies, personal email services like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are increasingly responsible for the accidental or deliberate loss of customer and corporate data.
