MANILA, Philippines -- Nearly half of hacking and other security-related incidents in companies today are still caused internally, necessitating better "behavioral" monitoring of employees, according to IBM.

These incidents are largely caused by employees who have access to company systems, or what IBM refers to as "privileged users."

"Employees who have access to critical systems number only about five percent of the entire workforce. But what they do affects the rest of the company," said Peter Rajnak, security solutions manager for IBM's software group in Asia Pacific.

And with more employees granted access to sensitive company data, the situation could get worse. For every new application that a company runs, like HR or human resource for example, access spreads to more employees.

What motivates these internal breaches?

"Among the usual reasons is revenge on the part of disgruntled employees, also caused by resulting mergers and acquisitions involving the company," said Rajnak, replying to questions from INQUIRER.net during a recent interview.

Meanwhile, Rajnak said new regulations that companies need to comply with are forcing IT departments to disclose these threats.

"It's not clear whether there are more of these incidents than before. It's just that now companies are forced to discuss these threats because of compliance," he said.

Robert Jones, IT security and privacy consultant for IBM Asia Pacific, advises IT managers to pay more attention to employee behavior and limit "gray areas."

"An HR employee, for example, logging on outside of office hours or not from his desk but is still accessing HR systems. As you go along implementing security policies, you try to look at this type of behavior," Jones said.

The two IBM executives visited Manila this week conducting briefings with local customers on enterprise resource management, which covers security and compliance.