The survey polled more than 5500 IT specialists from over 25 countries.
Seventy-three per cent of companies have been affected by internal information security incidents, and the largest single cause of confidential data losses are employees at 42 per cent, according to a survey commissioned by Kaspersky Lab.
The survey polled more than 5500 IT specialists from over 25 countries to find that 21 per cent of companies affected by internal threats lost valuable data that had an effect on their business.
According to the results, the average financial losses incurred by SMBs as a result of data leaks amount to $80,000 from accidental leaks and $47,000 from intentional leaks.
In addition to data leaks, the survey showed that other internal threats included the loss and theft of employees' mobile devices with 19 per cent of respondents confirming that they had lost a mobile device containing sensitive corporate data at least once a year.
Kaspersky Lab head of endpoint product management, Konstantin Voronkov, claimed that a security solution alone is not enough to protect a company's data.
"What's required is an integrated multi-level approach powered by security intelligence and other supplementary measures. These measures may include the use of specialized solutions and the introduction of security policies, such as restricting access rights."
According to Kaspersky Lab, the technology that protects against distributed denial of service (DDoS) and phishing attacks, encryption, protection of mobile devices, virtual infrastructure and financial transactions,all provide reliable targeted security for the individual nodes of a corporate IT infrastructure, and datacentres.