Organizations suffer an average of 3.8 insider attacks per year
It may be hackers and cyber criminals that are in the front of most people's minds when thinking of security, but a worrying number of attacks come from organization insiders.
New crowd-based research from user activity monitoring and behavior analysis specialist Spectorsoft shows that 62 percent of security professionals 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.
A worrying 45 percent of respondents said they couldn't tell if their organizations had suffered an insider attack in the past year. Of those that had, 22 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.
The average cost of fixing a successful insider attack is around $445,000 so with an average of almost four attacks per year the cost for some businesses could run into millions. 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 cited malicious data breaches. Yet despite these threats only 21 percent say they 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," says Mike Tierney, COO of 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".
More detailed information on the report is available on the Spectorsoft website.
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