When employees quit their job and move elsewhere, they often take sensitive data with them. This is according to a new report from cybersecurity experts at Unit 42, who claim there’s a “strong correlation” between employee turnover and data breaches.
Over the course of the first half of 2021, Unit 42 analyzed data from more than 700,000 endpoints. During that time, there was a 40 percent increase in data exposure, compared to H2 2020. Data exposure events also spiked in Q2 2021, when compared to Q1.
According to the researchers, data exposure peaked at the time when the US experienced a “massive shift” in employment.
Most of the time, it’s the source code that people take with them. The amount of source code exposed over the past year increased three times, and just in Q2 2021, it accounted for 11 percent of all data exposure events.
When people decide to take data with them, they usually use removable media, such as USBs (42 percent). When they don’t use USBs, they use cloud service providers (37 percent).
