If cybersecurity professionals didn’t have enough menaces on the radar, we also have to be concerned with insider threats. As the name implies, inside threats are users within the system that abuse or misuse it. They have access to it because they are authorized users of the network and its resources. What makes them a threat? Everything from poor training, intentional misuse, incidental misuse, and disgruntled workers, among others, explain why people with authorization abuse the system.
Here is some interesting information about insider threats from the Tech Jury website. To begin with, over one-third of businesses are hit by an insider threat. This is a global statistic so the problem is universal. Not surprisingly, more than 70% go unreported outside of the business. A main reason for the lack of reported inside threat attacks is the decrease organizations take to their reputation. For businesses with publicly traded stock, their stock prices drop as a result of reported attacks. The reason for not reporting them is financial.
More than two-thirds of insider threat attacks are caused by negligence. That means the vast majority could be prevented. The first thing to start with is training. I am not advocating for training for training's sake. Negligence often stems from a lack of understanding. If management ensures that policies are intentional and clear and that employees understand why procedures are as they are and how they align with organizational policies, fewer employees will, unknowingly, open the business up to threats.
Espionage has not even been mentioned yet. While it has a place among insider threats, it is a small percentage compared to others. When it comes to intentional insider threats, there are three main reasons. The first is fraud at 55%. The second reason is monetary gain at 49%. Rounding out the top three is IP theft at 44%. These are not mutually exclusive reasons. Someone could use fraud as a means of pulling off credit card access. That would give us the first two reasons in one insider. It is very common that people have multi-layered motivations for their hacking. This falls in line with that.
You may be wondering how the picture illustrates an insider threat. Ada, our basset hound, is an authorized user in our house. She is not, however, an authorized consumer of her daddy’s coffee. She has abused her authorized access to gain a resource she is not cleared to have. That’s an insider threat.
The statistics and facts in my summary are from the Tech Jury page at the following link: https://techjury.net/blog/insider-threat-statistics/.
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