Most Fraud Is an Inside Job, Says Survey

NetworkWorld: According to the Kroll Annual Global Fraud Report, 75 percent of executives say their enterprises were impacted by fraud last year. The good news is, that’s a decrease from 88 percent the previous year, but the bad news is that these security breaches still cost companies an average of 2.1 percent of earnings.

In the majority of cases–60 percent–fraud is committed by an insider, and the most common type of fraud is theft of information or electronic data. Half of all enterprises say they are moderately to highly vulnerable to information theft.

“Compared to just ten years ago, more and more the value of a company is not contained in tangible things, it’s contained in the company’s ideas, and those ideas tend to live on information systems in the form of digital data,” said Kroll’s Richard Plansky. “That’s where the value of companies lives and insiders have tremendous access to that information. Here’s a place where technology is truly a double-edged sword. These wonderful sophisticated IT systems make critical data easy to access for a wide-range of employees. That’s the upside. But the downside is also that it makes critical data easy to access for a wide-range of employees.”