The insider threat is a multifaceted challenge that represents a significant cybersecurity risk to organizations today. Some are malicious insiders such as employees looking to steal data or sabotage the organization. Some are unintentional insiders such as employees who make careless mistakes or fall victim to phishing attacks.
If you need a refresher on what insider threats are or their impact, please refer to our previous blog posts:
Identifying insider threats is becoming increasingly important. Malicious insiders often carry out their operations over time, taking steps to hide their activity and remain undetected. This makes it particularly difficult to detect and prevent these types of threats. In fact, malicious insider threat activity often goes undetected and unreported.
Unintentional insiders, for example, may accidentally misconfigure systems, modify data, lose portable devices, share confidential information, or fail to follow security policies. This can lead to data breaches, financial losses, reputational damage, and even regulatory violations. Any of these can put an organization at risk.
In a recent study, Tessian found that employees across different industries who have contributed to building knowledge at an organization have admitted to downloading, saving, or sending work-related documents to their personal accounts before leaving or after being dismissed from their jobs. The key element to note here is the sense of ownership that employees felt over the items they created while on the job. This can be construed as their motivation, and even though there was no malicious intent involved, these employees in a way ended up becoming unintentional insiders. Such insiders can put an organization at risk because they may now be in possession of confidential or proprietary data. If their personal devices are compromised or lost, this data could fall into the wrong hands...Read More!
