In the wake of massive data breaches such as those at the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management, health insurer Anthem and retailer Target, an enterprise’s initial reaction might be to tighten the security around networks and data. However, you may be forgetting one critical component: the insider threat.
According to a June SpectorSoft report, 62 percent of security professionals polled said insider incidents are up at their organizations, and privileged users are often the prime suspect. The report also found that security professionals could not determine if the enterprise had suffered more attacks or not. Of those who could, the average number of incidents was 3.8 per enterprise. The top insider threats identified were data leaks (63 percent), inadvertent data breaches (57 percent) and malicious data breaches (53 percent).