Survey Reveals Damaging Insider Threats Rose to New Highs in the Last 12 Months

Today’s most damaging security threats do not always originate from malicious outsiders or malware as you might expect, but from your trusted insiders with access to sensitive data and systems. Both malicious and negligent insiders can wreak havoc on the security of your sensitive information from customer and employee data, to IP and other company confidentials. The 2019 Insider Threat Report from Nucleus Cyber and Cybersecurity Insiders reveals the latest trends and challenges facing organizations, how IT and security professionals are dealing with risky insiders, and how organizations are preparing to better protect their critical data and IT infrastructure.

Survey results gathered from information security professionals in the 400,000-member Cybersecurity Insiders community found that:

• 70% of organizations confirm insider attacks are becoming more frequent
• 68% feel extremely to moderately vulnerable to insider attacks
• 39% identified cloud storage and file sharing apps as the most vulnerable to insider attacks
• 85% of organizations find it moderately difficult to very difficult to determine the actual damage of an insider attack
• 56% believe detecting insider attacks has become significantly to somewhat harder since migrating to the cloud

Security and IT teams’ attention is often focused on hackers, but attacks from within are a significant threat to every industry as the report findings shows. Organizations must be well-equipped to safeguard sensitive information from outsiders and insiders alike.

Data-centric security tools like NC Protect control access and actions that can be taken based on the sensitivity of the content and user conditions at the time of access to proactively mitigate risks. The 2019 Insider Threat Report findings should raise the alarm for every organization to evaluate their preparedness, strategies and tools used to protect data from increasing inside threats.