"...IBM's ISS X-Force research team [reported last week] that it has detected a 30% increase in network and Web-based security events in the past 120 days, with the total number rising from 1.8 billion per day to more than 2.5 billion worldwide. The researchers attribute a significant portion of the uptick to insider activity motivated by economic fear.

"Unlike a 'quick firing,' tens of thousands of employees are readying themselves for the eventuality of losing their jobs -- and no doubt a high percentage of them [will be] 'disgruntled,'" said IBM security expert Gunter Ollmann in a blog earlier this year. "In today's computer-based work environment, with a little planning and forethought, a disgruntled employee can do a lot of damage with little fear of being caught and prosecuted."

"Every day we're stopping more and more of these sorts of events -- many more than we saw before the downturn. It's a sad fact that rates of employee fraud rise in a down economy." Most of the economically motivated insider attacks are not particularly sophisticated or even well-thought-out, Rowney says. "In general, these are crimes of passion committed by employees who are angry or scared," he explains.

"These are not people who are sophisticated in IT, developing super-sneaky ways of stealing or sabotaging data without being detected. They're people who are under pressure, or who are mad and seeking vengeance, and they make a large cluster of bad decisions. In most cases, these are fairly obvious activities that can easily be detected if you have the right tools in place."

"We've seen clients that think they have only one instance of a database, and then through the discovery process, they find that there are 18 unauthorized copies of the data spread around the enterprise. These companies are in no position to leverage policies and controls because they don't know where the data is."