Insider Threats can have a costly impact on your business. Discover 4 costly impacts of insider threats to your business and how Isecurdata can help your business to reduce the impact of Insider Threats.
A 2020 Global Report shows that insider threat average global cost rose by 31% and the occurrence of incidents spiked by 47%, this gave a great deal of insight into the severity and occurrence of this threat in businesses. Hence, the need for businesses to be aware of the costly impacts of insider threats and how to mitigate their risk.
Many businesses invest a huge resource in security defenses to harden the network against external malicious attacks. However, they fail to implement protection against potential threats by compromised or malicious insiders.
An Insider can be a current or former employee, vendor, or business partner who has or had authorized access to the business’s networks or systems and data. Insiders have the tendencies to abuse their authorized access to critical systems and information; because valuable information assets are accessed by insiders which are not available to outsiders, reparations resulting from insider attacks can be very costly.
3 Major Types of Insider Threat
- Malicious Insider: This applies when an insider intentionally abuses legitimate credentials maliciously to steal data for personal or financial gains. This act also causes great harm to the business’s information asset security.
- Unintentional Insider: This applies when an insider, through actions or inaction with no malicious intent, innocently causes harm to or significantly increases the chances of future harm to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of business information, resource, or assets.
- Careless Insider: This applies when an insider makes the most common mistakes and does not pay noteworthy attention to the security best practices of the business, resulting in an unintentional and unknowing exposure of key resources and assets to outsiders.
4 Costly Impact of Insider Threats to Your Business
- Insider Fraud
This is one of the most common and highly severe impacts of insider threat where the insider’s intention leading a fraud is financial gain. This calls for businesses to develop measures to protect assets and valuable information as financial losses will have a huge impact on their productivity and effectiveness.
- Data Leak
Insider Threats can result in a data leak, the accidental exposure of sensitive data physically, on the internet, or any other form such as laptops or hard drives which means a cybercriminal can easily gain access to the confidential data effortlessly. The effect of this will be a huge comeback attack on the business networks or systems.
- IP Theft
Intellectual Property theft (IP Theft) refers to stealing people or a company’s idea, creative expressions, and inventions such as trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and patents. IP can also include proprietary products such as software data, web content, business processes, etc. Insider can exploit their privileged access to sensitive files, commit economic espionage, steal trade secrets, and either sell it to business competitors or outsiders.
- Insider Threat Disruption
This applies when insiders with technical positions and highly sophisticated skills use privilege escalation techniques and implementation of malware such as advanced persistent threats (APTs) to distrust information systems or system infrastructural operations. This harms the business’s data or specific individual due to unmet expectations or disgruntlement.
Most businesses have perimeter defenses, but fail to defend against the threats inside the perimeter. Isecurdata with over thirty years of IT Security experience and standardized cybersecurity specialists can help you to reduce the impact of insider threats to your business with departmental tailored cybersecurity training for your employees and ongoing support to ensure security resilience.
Secure your business – book a consultation call with one of our cybersecurity specialists today.