Russian Firms Accumulate Digital Clutter: 35% of Corporate Files Unused for Years, Weak Passwords Expose Sensitive Data
Russian businesses continue to accumulate digital clutter while granting overly broad access rights across corporate storage systems. Garda, a company within IKS Holding, analyzed repositories belonging to more than 100 organizations and uncovered multiple serious concerns.
The dataset included over 157 TB of data and more than 511,000 user accounts. Approximately 35% of files had remained untouched for more than five years. Duplicate copies may account for another 35% of stored volume. In some sectors, up to one-third of the space was occupied by personal photographs, videos, archives, and other non-business content.
Paying to store this digital waste is only part of the problem. The larger the number of uncontrolled copies scattered across folders and resources, the harder it becomes to determine where confidential information resides and who can access it.
Access management practices also raised alarms. More than 33% of accounts used critically weak passwords or passwords that had not been rotated for a long time. Auditors discovered numerous contractor and temporary employee accounts inactive for over 90 days. In large organizations, direct permissions issued outside security groups were common. Folders with wide access rights often contained passport scans, client registries, database exports, and other sensitive documents.
Garda concludes that manual remediation of such volumes is no longer practical. The company advises organizations to regularly inventory and classify information, manage access centrally, and automate the full data lifecycle from creation to deletion.
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