More than half of organizations suffer data loss, says CompTIA

Another interesting piece of research this morning from CompTIA. According to its ninth annual IT Security in the Workforce study, one in five organizations say  they definitely experienced sensitive data loss in 2011, while another 32 percent say they likely suffered data loss.

Directly from the report:

The leading cause of data loss for an organization appears to be data in motion, i.e. sending information via unencrypted email; downloading or uploading unencrypted data to a website; transporting files via a USB flash drive, or accessing the Internet via an unsecured WiFi network. Data loss affects many types of corporate information, but here are the top five:

--Confidential corporate financial data – 65 percent

--Confidential employee data – 52 percent

--Confidential customer data – 27 percent

--Corporate intellectual property – 26 percent

--Suspect data loss/leakage, but not have identified what was lost – 21 percent

More highlights:

--71 percent of firms consider cybersecurity a high priority, up from 49 percent last year

--Four out of five companies expect to increase their IT budgets

--40 Percent of companies report difficulty in hiring IT security specialists

--Three out of four organizations experienced a cyberattack in 2011

--Malware tops list of security concerns among IT and business execs

--58 percent of respondents believe hacking is a more critical threat today than 2 years ago

--43 percent of end-users rate downtime /business interruptions as their most significant cloud concern 

CompTIA VP of Research Tim Herbert said in a statement that he believes the real percentage of companies losing data is probably much higher, and that they just don’t know it. “Companies may never know the extent to which they’ve been harmed by sensitive data falling into the wrong hands,” he said.