I stumbled upon a great article today about the risks associated with temporary employees. This is expecially important information during the christmas season due to the large increase in temporary employees.  The article outlines three main issues faced with the addition of temporary employees.

  1. Information Leakage
  2. Lack of Basic Data Security Management
  3. Exposure to External Threats

The article outlines the results from a survey given to temporary employees about their behavior and policies at these jobs.  There are some pretty interesting statistics in the article.  Here are just a few of them.

  • 87.7% of respondents were able to access documents from the company network drive or electronic folders that permanent staff use on a day to day basis
  • 52% used someone else’s e-mail account or a general company e-mail address
  • 78.9% of temporary workers said they did not have to sign a PC or Internet use policy
  • 97% said they either didn’t understand or had never heard of the Computer Misuse Act
  • 25.5% accessed download sites during work hours
  • 67% of temporary workers used social networking sites like Facebook during working hours

The complete set of statistics and article can be found at the following link. 
Businesses are ill-prepared for the security risk introduced by temporary workers

As hackers find new and different ways to use the information found on the internet at sites such as Facebook and Myspace, we will start seeing a whole different arena of ways to gain information that we must know about and be caution.

 Salesforce.com just ran into some trouble in October. On Oct. 19, Security Fix reported that payroll giant Automatic Data Processing (ADP) and several banks — including Suntrust — were among a number of institutions that were victimized by a series of highly-targeted phishing scams.  This was done through a spoofed email that asked employees to download a file which was most likely malware to gain passwords and usernames.  More Info

This is just one of the risks of which temporary employees and full-time employees  must be aware. Management must be aware of these threats and take steps to mitigate these risks.