Computers are taken on a pencil – Newspaper Kommersant No. 189 (7390) of 10/12/2022

Russian companies are increasingly implementing software to track their employees in corporate information systems: sales growth reaches 30% year-on-year, developers say. Interest is shown by the public sector, large industrial enterprises, even small and medium-sized businesses. Demand has surged amid rising data breaches and cyber fraud. In the short term, experts believe, the outflow of specialists abroad who continue to work remotely will also stimulate the purchase of such solutions.

The popularity of solutions for monitoring the actions of employees in the information loop of organizations is growing, the developers of such products told Kommersant. Thus, according to Staffcop, from March to September, the demand for programs for tracking the working time of employees and their actions (for example, unloading commercial information from the working system) increased by 11% year-on-year, and the number of pilot projects of the company (software testing with new customers ) in this segment — by 37%. The lack of proper control in the internal space of the organization makes it possible for disloyal employees to gain access to confidential information and subsequently “merge” it into the network, Staffcop explains.

This is already the second wave of demand for such solutions, the first came in the spring of 2020, when companies massively switched to remote work, notes Vladimir Ulyanov, head of the Zecurion analytical center. In the class of Staff Control solutions, the company is now seeing growth of about 30% year-on-year. Sometimes companies need data that can be used as digital evidence, for example, when investigating incidents and finding those responsible, Mr. Ulyanov explains. More often, however, he elaborates, organizations “need a clear cut: who works more efficiently, whose activities are more useful.”

In the InfoWatch Group, the demand for the mentioned solutions grew by more than 20% in the first half of the year.

In particular, these are products for preventing leaks of confidential information and analyzing communications. “The main demand is observed from the commercial and financial sectors,” said Amir Dautov, commercial director of InfoWatch Group.

SearchInform also sees interest in control solutions both in the DLP-systems segment (a program for protecting against data leaks, discipline control) and in the time control segment.

There are several reasons: the trend towards security due to the increased number of cyber attacks on companies and the tightening of legislation on the protection of personal data, Alexey Parfentiev, head of the analytics department at SearchInform, notes: “At the end of the year, we expect sales to increase above average.” According to the expert, the dynamics are more noticeable in the public sector, while in business the growth is “more even”. State structures are still “at an early stage of maturity in matters of information security,” RTK-Solar specifies, expecting an intensive growth in the implementation of such solutions in 2023-2024.

The activity of cyberattacks in Russia has grown since the end of February, they mainly came from abroad and led to both data leaks and service interruptions.

Malefactors began not only to attack the infrastructure of the victims more intensively, but also to actively look for insiders in companies and departments.

By the end of the summer, cybersecurity experts were talking about an increase in offers to employees of Russian organizations to open access to internal data or run malicious code (see “Kommersant” dated August 7). If earlier such requests were placed exclusively on the darknet, then since the spring of this year they began to appear in Telegram channels.

In conditions of uncertainty about the future, employees are prone to violations, data theft, corporate fraud attempts, Vladimir Ulyanov notes. Staffcop adds that the number of Russians who have left the country but continue to work remotely may now become a separate incentive for the growth of solutions for monitoring employees.

Tatyana Isakova