Survey Finds Recession Hurting Data Security

More than 34 percent of U.S. companies that responded to a Proofpoint survey on e-mail security and data loss prevention reported that they had had a leak of sensitive data in the last year, according to this Dark Reading piece.

The recession's effect on budgets and layoffs of both IT and non-IT staff was blamed for high numbers of security issues in the survey.

The survey also found that action is being taken; more than half of the companies have had to discipline employees over e-mail policy and 31 percent report terminating someone over a policy violation.

Also among the positive news is that over two-thirds of companies in the survey have social networking policies. More than 80 percent of companies with over 20,000 employees have such a policy. However, more than 20 percent of large companies report having fired an employee over social networking use in the last year.