There is another caveat here in that awareness of all security threats are growing. We also asked whether worry about external security threats had grown over the last three years, with which 46% agreed. This highlights again the fact that organisations are more concerned about external threats than internal.

However, the fact that more than one in ten IT professionals told us they were more aware of the dangers of internal threats as a consequence of the scandal shows that Edward Snowden has inadvertently shone a light on what is a significant security issue for IT professionals.

Insider threats continue to be an under-addressed problem

Still not significant enough for many though, it seems. It is concerning that despite most security breaches coming from employees, and the greater awareness Snowden has created of insider threats, as a security concern for IT decision makers it is still a laggard behind viruses and hackers. It is odd that IT professionals list data loss as a greater concern ahead of insider threats, when we know that employees are the greatest cause of data loss.

When asking IT managers to score their overall security policies out of 10, larger businesses were more confident with the score being 8.29 for those with more than 10,000 employees, compared to 7.23 for businesses of all sizes. This is interesting considering the considerably greater number of occurrences of internal security breaches in larger businesses, reiterating the suggestion that IT managers are not considering insider threats seriously enough in their overall security policies.