Disgruntled employees to cyber espionage by staff selling out to the competition are some of the many ways security in publicly traded companies can be compromised.

Investors & CEO's alike need to understand that in many cases the "enemy within" can be even more dangerous than any outside force coming against a corporate entity.

A case in point is the city of San Francisco allegedly getting locked out of its new computer network by a network administrator named Terry Childs.

Childs who gave police bogus passwords now sits in jail.

The Christian Science Monitor reports...

"Childs pleaded not guilty last Thursday to four felony counts of computer network tampering.

His lawyer declared it all a big misunderstanding and called the $5 million bail inappropriate.

But San Francisco officials are not sure what Childs has done behind password locks, and they worry he might have created back channels into city data.

So-called malicious insiders are surprisingly common, and they tend to be more harmful and difficult to thwart than outside hackers, say experts.

Despite the threat, one recent study found that organizations are growing more lax in guarding against them.

Most of the security solutions [deployed] are outward facing, focusing on the moat and the turrets, not determining if the threat can come from inside” the castle walls, says Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert formerly with the World Bank Treasury and now with Core Security Technologies in Boston"

The monitor goes on to explain...

"Roughly a quarter of computer system attacks are inside jobs, according to the past two years of the E-Crime Watch Survey from CSO Magazine and the US Secret Service.

Their most recent report in 2007 found steep drops over the previous year in the percentage of organizations taking common protective measures:

•Background checks on employees and contractors dropped from 73 to 57 percent.
•Employee monitoring went from 59 to 42 percent.
•Employee security training plummeted from 68 to 38 percent.

The report defines an insider as a current or former employee, services provider, or contractor.

Outside technology vendors and partners who are given insider access constitute a fast-growing source of attacks, according to a new four-year study conducted by Verizon."

Any way you cut it, preventing data theft in every area of the cyber jungle is a massive undertaking.

Whether you're a govermnent agency, business entity or just someone who shops online, be aware your informatiion is worth money to someone !