A new report by Reconnex suggests that the majority of companies expose vast amounts of employee personal information

Some of the high-level results include:

• 91% of companies assessed exposed employee and/or customer personal data
• 80% of companies assessed had unknown peer-to-peer file sharing protocols running, such as Kazaa, Bit Torrent, WinMX

The report claims, “The origin of the vast majority of these disclosures stemmed from human resources departments who often accidentally exposed employees’ personal information when they communicate with partners in health insurance, payroll, workers compensation and other third-party processors.” Many of the exposures occur from employees mailing Excel and even text files with employee names, data of births, social security numbers and even bank account information through insecure methods such as email.

The P2P usage not only opens a door into corporate firewalls but also potentially exposes corporations to liability from distributing copyrighted materials.

It is important to note that Reconnex is a risk management vendor and that the company may benefit from an increased fear of personal data exposure. However, even if the real exposure is only half of the shown results, companies do need to be on notice.

The July index report can be downloaded as a PDF from Reconnec’s web site.