68% of employees expose confidential metadata to third parties

Valuable metadata is being exposed by uninformed professionals that forget to remove the information from emails due to a lack of secure file sharing methods present or tools to remove the data.

Workshare’s latest survey found that 68 per cent of professionals are exposing their businesses’ most sensitive and confidential information by forgetting to remove hidden data from documents shared with customers, suppliers, and colleagues.

“Businesses must regain control and stem the flow of highly confidential information leaving the enterprise. In a bid to safeguard businesses’ most valuable assets, Workshare has developed a free educational tool for users to detect hidden data in documents and eliminate risk when sharing corporate content,” stated Anthony Foy, CEO of Workshare.

The survey of 800 global knowledge workers found out that companies are failing to provide employees with secure tools for detecting and removing the hidden metadata.

Further to this, 65 per cent of employees think it’s their responsibility to make sure sensitive company data isn’t leaked and just 32 per cent of knowledge workers always clean files of hidden sensitive data before sharing.

Of those surveyed, 70 per cent that forward emails with attachments without reading them first don’t remove sensitive data before sending and 80 per cent of employees use unsecure file sharing methods and put corporate data at risk as a result.