The least trustworthy members of staff are seen to be salespeople, temporary staff, security guards and cleaners, according to new research.

The ’Trust, Security and Passwords‘ survey carried out by Cyber-Ark Software revealed that the most reliable and honest staff were perceived to be those who worked in the legal, IT and HR departments, as well as the boss‘ secretary.

One in 10 respondents nominated the marketing department as the least trustworthy while the same amount pointed to company directors as potential security threats.

“In an organisation you never know who you can trust,” said Calum Macleod, European director for Cyber-Ark. “There is increasing evidence to show that most breaches are carried out by insiders who are those people you least suspect such as the temporary staff who may be paid by your competitors to extract vital information.

“The findings of this survey show that there is distrust across all groups of workers and our advice to companies who need to protect sensitive information is to encrypt it, lock it away in a digital safe and make sure that you only allow staff to have access to what they need, by creating layers of security on your network.”

Other recent research conduced by Carnegie Mellon University on behalf of the US Department of Defence found that the group of workers that posed the biggest threat to an organisation‘s security were those with access to IT systems such as IT staff.

“It is time companies take stock of who they employ and not to naively allow staff general access to everything and anything,” added Macleod.

“Often people can do more damage than you can imagine just at the click of a mouse so it‘s worth sitting up and taking note of just who has access to what, researching your vulnerabilities and then locking down and securing not only your physical backdoors but also your virtual ones.”