Survey Shows Insider Threats on the Rise: Organizations Experience an Average of 3.8 Attacks per Year

PRESS RELEASE

VERO BEACH, FL − (June 24, 2015) − SpectorSoft™, a leader in the user activity monitoring and behavior analysis market, today released results of the Insider Threat Report, a crowd-based research project that was done in cooperation with the 260,000+ member Information Security Community on LinkedIn and Crowd Research Partners to gain more insight into the state of insider threats and solutions to prevent them. The final report results were based on a comprehensive survey of over 500 cybersecurity professionals from organizations of varying sizes across many industries; the results highlight the increasing need for better security practices and solutions to reduce the risks posed by insider threats.

Among the report’s findings:

The Rise of Insider Attacks: A majority of security professionals (62 percent) saw a rise in insider attacks over the last 12 months, while 22 percent saw no rise, and 16 percent were unsure if they had been attacked or not.

Frequency of Insider Attacks: Forty-five percent of respondents cannot determine whether their organizations experienced insider attacks in the last 12 months. Twenty-two percent said they experienced between one and five attacks, and 24 percent of organizations believe they experienced no attacks at all. Of the respondents who were willing to admit they suffered an insider attack, the average number was 3.8 incidents per organization per year.

Cost of Remediation: The overall average cost of remediating a successful insider attack is around $445,000. With an average risk of 3.8 insider attacks per year, the total remediation cost of insider attacks can quickly run into the millions of dollars.

Monitor Insider Activity on the Endpoint: The survey highlights the need for robust endpoint security and policies; respondents identified endpoints as the most common launch point for insider attacks (56 percent); this was followed by networks (43 percent) and mobile devices (42 percent).

Top Insider Threats: Organizations overwhelmingly maintained that data loss was the top concern regarding insider threats. When asked which types of insider attacks were most concerning, 63 percent of respondents said data leaks, 57 percent said inadvertent data breaches and 53 percent said malicious data breaches.

Vulnerable Data: Sixty-four percent of respondents feel extremely, very or moderately vulnerable to insider threats.Due to its value to attackers, the most vulnerable type of data is customer data (57 percent). This was closely followed by intellectual property (54 percent) and financial data (52 percent).

Internal versus External Attacks: Sixty-two percent of respondents find it more difficult to detect internal threats than external threats, while 38 percent cannot determine which type of threat is most difficult to detect.

Monitoring the Threat: When it comes to threat monitoring, 75 percent of companies monitor the security controls of their applications, 60 percent monitor a majority of all of their key IT assets, while only 21 percent continuously monitor user behavior taking place on their networks.

“The survey and report called out a rise in insider threats, the difficulty in detecting them, and the significant costs in cleaning up after a successful insider attack,” said Mike Tierney, COO, SpectorSoft.  “Companies need the ability to detect for anomalies in user behavior to make sure they are aware of the threats that exist within their organizations, because insiders will deviate from their normal behavior patterns when planning and executing an attack.” 

About SpectorSoft

SpectorSoft is the leader in user activity monitoring and an innovator in user behavior analysis software. SpectorSoft has helped more than 36,000 businesses, government organizations, schools and law enforcement agencies improve how they address security and achieve compliance. SpectorSoft award-winning solutions include enterprise-grade insider threat detection software, a powerful user activity monitoring solution deployed by thousands of companies in more than 110 countries, robust Event and Security Log Management, and the world’s leading employee investigation tool. For more information, please visit www.spectorsoft.com.