A recent survey from CyberArk reveals that a third of IT staff admit snooping on their colleagues:
More than one-third of information technology professionals abuse administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues’ salary details or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.
Data security company Cyber-Ark surveyed more than 400 senior IT professionals in the United States and Britain, and found that 35 percent admitted to snooping, while 74 percent said they could access information that was not relevant to their role.
In a similar survey 12 months ago, 33 percent of IT professionals admitted to snooping.
Of course this is a vendor survey so assume the usual caveats. But still this is a surprising number to me. Surely all of these people must realize that getting caught would be grounds for termination, for doing something that they are unlikely to get more than a voyeuristic benefit from. Is knowing how much your boss makes really worth getting fired over? It wouldn’t be to me.
Some just can’t resist the forbidden fruit I suppose.