Feature
Collaboration increasingly takes place in the digital tools that populate our workplaces — think Slack, Notion, ClickUp, Miro, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, even internal wikis. But a growing, often overlooked risk accompanies our reliance on collaboration tools: rogue content, the unauthorized, unverified or misleading information circulating within an organization’s own digital environment.
Rogue Content in the Workplace
Unlike external misinformation, rogue content in the workplace isn't necessarily malicious or intentional. It can take the form of outdated content shared as current, speculative messages presented as policy, or AI-generated responses that sound authoritative, but are subtly inaccurate. When left unchecked, rogue content undermines trust, disrupts workflows and can lead to costly compliance errors.
According to Gartner, 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to effectively perform their roles. Much of this is due to fragmented communication across platforms — employees now use an average of 11 different applications a day, increasing the risk of outdated or contradictory content circulating unchecked.
Compounding the problem, IDC estimates that knowledge workers spend up to 2.5 hours per day — nearly 30% of their work time — searching for or verifying information. This productivity drain reflects a deeper issue: the presence of inconsistent or rogue information within internal systems.
Shadow Content = Unsecured Digital Exhaust
Rogue content is the ungoverned, often unintentional byproduct of our digital efficiency, Boomchi Kumar, director of security consulting at Trace3, told Reworked.
It includes data, files or digital assets created, stored or shared outside of approved platforms, like a spreadsheet emailed to a personal address, or a PDF saved to a local drive. Even content spun up by generative AI tools operating outside sanctioned workflows creates problems.
"All of it lives beyond the reach of standard security protocols — and often beyond the awareness of those responsible for enforcing them," Kumar said.
IT and security teams have little to no visibility into this kind of content as it is often buried in unsanctioned apps, locked away in personal cloud accounts or scattered across disconnected team tools, he continued.
And while it might seem harmless, the risks are anything but. Rogue content can include sensitive or regulated data like personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI) or critical intellectual property (IP). Worse still, people share it externally without the usual safeguards, store it without backups and leave it to linger in places where retrieval or deletion is impossible.
Kumar lists the potential consequences: A misplaced document today could become tomorrow’s data breach. A forgotten file could derail a compliance audit. And the more this shadow content spreads, the harder it becomes to enforce even the most robust security frameworks.
“Unchecked, rogue content does not just create risk — it undermines the very systems built to manage it. And in an era of increasing digital complexity, organizations can no longer afford to let that happen,” Kumar said.
What makes it even more difficult to control is the fact that rouge content is not always created in the shadows — it often begins within familiar, authorized tools like Microsoft 365, Salesforce or Google Drive. He points out that the issue arises not from where it starts, but where it ends up. Rogue data is typically stored in unauthorized folders, personal drives or open shared directories where few, if any, safeguards are in place.
Kumar shares a scenario where an employee creates a personal folder containing a customer’s personally identifiable information (PII), without informing anyone or another, where an employee stores API access keys in a plain text file, in a shared folder that's externally accessible. Small actions like these can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.
The problem is getting worse, too.
"With the rise of AI tools and automated workflows, content can be generated — and disseminated — faster than ever. But these tools often operate outside of established compliance frameworks. As a result, the data they produce may lack essential controls like classification, masking, retention policies or sensitivity labels,” Kumar said.
Good Intentions, Bad Consequences
For Kunal Agarwal, founder and CEO at dope.security, the pervasiveness of rogue content is where the real challenge lies.
"It can originate from virtually anywhere," Agarwal said. "It’s not just about monitoring where users are uploading files or which SaaS applications they’re interacting with."
The issue runs deeper; it is multifaceted. “It involves questions like: What data was used to generate this content? Was the creation even within your control? And often, the answer is no,” he added.
Some of the most common forms of rogue content inside organizations today include AI-generated images and text. In many cases, these assets are completely harmless, created with good intentions to quickly fulfill a need or address a task.
But even then, this content can deviate significantly from a company’s branding standards or data handling policies. A simple asset created for speed and convenience might not be malicious, but still cause confusion or dilute brand integrity.
Detecting and monitoring rogue content is no easy feat, because it lives in hidden, decentralized corners of the digital workspace. Traditional tools fall short, Agarwal noted. Education, therefore, becomes a critical defense. It's unrealistic to suggest locking down every content creation point — it turns into a game of whack-a-mole, and employees will find workarounds if it affects their productivity.
“Most employees are not trying to do anything wrong. In fact, their intentions are usually aligned with business goals — they are just trying to get things done. But that is exactly where the risk lies. Without clear guidance and guardrails, rogue content can introduce incorrect data into systems or expose the organization to reputational damage,” Agarwal said.
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The Growing Threat of AI Generated Content
Personal cloud storage, messaging and communications platforms, and local/personal device storage are at the root of most of the rogue content, Ironscales CEO Eyal Benishti told Reworked. Employees can store all manner of customer-associated content and data (e.g. billing information, transaction logs, support transcripts) on personal Dropbox accounts, or downloaded on personal cellular devices for work purposes — opening this data up to unauthorized access and exposure.
Benishti also flags the increasing number of problems caused by generative AI. Employees generate things like marketing content with AI, which leads to potential brand damage due to unvetted copy, for example.
It also manifests when employees use sensitive data as generative AI input (e.g. entering customer billing information into ChatGPT and asking it to remove any duplicates). Benishti acknowledged while this could save time, there's still an unknown degree of risk that the LLM uses the sensitive information for training, meaning it could potentially be retrieved at a later date.
More to the point, he said, AI generated content is getting better by the day. It is now easy to create lifelike audio, video and static images with the click of a button, most indistinguishable from the real thing.
He predicts organizations will invest in a new class of AI and deepfake detection technologies, which use AI to identify and flag AI-generated content. "As AI generated content continues to evolve, humans will be less and less capable of distinguishing it from real media on their own. So, now is the time for organizations to start fighting fire with fire," Benishti concluded.
Editor's note: Interested in other workplace-security topics? Read on:
- It's Too Late to Stop Bring Your Own AI. So Get Your BYOAI Strategy in Place — With workers already bringing external generative AI solutions into the workplace, managers need to develop Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI) strategies.
- Why Shadow IT Is Your Best Friend in the Digital Workplace — Rather than preemptively banning all shadow IT, businesses should see it as a testing grounds and a signal of employee pain points.
- The Potential and Risks of AI-Powered Data Integration — Companies are racing to AI-driven data integration, with good reasons. But going too fast carries security risks, too.