How Insider Cyber Threats Operate, Current Losses Estimated at $1m Yearly

Most cybersecurity landscape data is focused on outsider attacks; however, recent findings reveal that insider threats are becoming more common. Attacks originating from within the company are much more elusive since standard security practices do not work.

According to data analyzed by Atlas VPN, 65% of organizations suffered from one or more insider attacks in the last 12 months.

Insider threats come from employees or other internal users, such as contractors, that have access to the company’s internal databases. There are two types of malicious insiders — those with harmful intent and those who are simply negligent.

Rachel Welch, COO of Atlas VPN, explains why insider threats are much more difficult to defend against: “Outside hackers have to find ways to break through firewalls and other security measures to get into the company’s databases. On the other hand, many internal users already have access to those databases, so the same safety steps are not applicable.”

Incidents caused by insider threats are becoming more common, so let’s look at the monetary damages caused by these events. As a side-note, if the incident does go public, companies’ public image gets hurt, which, in the long-run, can cause even more losses than the immediate incident remediation costs.

Nearly half (49%) of surveyed leaders stated that the remediations after an insider attack cost less than $100 thousand. Another 30% of respondents expressed that monetary damages caused by a single incident are anywhere between $100 thousand and $500 thousand.

A smaller part of the surveyed experts — 12%, stated that the average cost of remediation after an attack is somewhere between $500 thousand to $1 million.