8 Surprising Statistics About Insider Threats
Insider theft and negligence is real--and so are the practices that amplify the risks.
August 17, 2016
![](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt6d90778a997de1cd/blte178db1880162d56/64f0da658aa8250d64295399/01-insider.jpeg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Even though insider threat events are typically much more infrequent than external attacks, they usually pose a much higher severity of risk for organizations when they do happen. Whether malicious or simply negligent, insiders need access to sensitive intellectual property and systems to do their jobs. As a result, when they break policy accidentally or choose to steal, their actions stand to do a tremendous amount of damage to a business. Here's how recent surveys and statistics measure perceptions about the risk posed by insider threats, along with some of the common shortfalls in IT security that unnecessarily expose organizations to higher insider risks.
Sixty-nine percent of enterprise security executives reported experiencing an attempted theft or corruption of data by insiders during the last 12 months, according to Accenture and HfS Research.
Sixty-two percent of business users report that they have access to company data that they probably should not see, according to the Ponemon Institute.
Ponemon also reported that 43% of businesses need a month or longer to detect employees accessing files or emails they're not authorized to see.
Nearly a third of all organizations still have no capability to prevent or deter an insider incident or attack, according to the SANS Institute.
Digging further, survey respondents reported to SANS that only 9% of them rank their insider prevention methods as very effective.
Forty-five percent of IT executives say malicious insider attacks is one of the email security risks they are most ill-prepared to cope with, according to a study by Mimecast.
In one study by Gartner that examined malicious insider incidents, 62% involved employees looking to establish a second stream of income off of their employers' sensitive data, 29% stole information on the way out the door to help future endeavors and 9% were saboteurs.
One Texas man who worked at Citibank was able to take down connectivity to approximately 90% of all Citibank networks in North America by erasing the configuration files for nine routers in Citibank's global network operations center, following a poor performance review. He was sentenced to almost two years in federal prison last month.
One Texas man who worked at Citibank was able to take down connectivity to approximately 90% of all Citibank networks in North America by erasing the configuration files for nine routers in Citibank's global network operations center, following a poor performance review. He was sentenced to almost two years in federal prison last month.
Even though insider threat events are typically much more infrequent than external attacks, they usually pose a much higher severity of risk for organizations when they do happen. Whether malicious or simply negligent, insiders need access to sensitive intellectual property and systems to do their jobs. As a result, when they break policy accidentally or choose to steal, their actions stand to do a tremendous amount of damage to a business. Here's how recent surveys and statistics measure perceptions about the risk posed by insider threats, along with some of the common shortfalls in IT security that unnecessarily expose organizations to higher insider risks.
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