Insider threats: How secure is your business?

Prevent, detect and respond to espionage, financial crime and data theft

Organizations across critical sectors—including financial services, telecommunications, health care, utilities and government—are vulnerable to a range of insider threats that can undermine their operations from within.

These threats can take the form of state-sponsored and corporate espionage, financial crimes such as money laundering, theft of sensitive business assets, sabotage and physical threats. While many insider threats are malicious, driven by foreign adversaries, disgruntled employees or industrial espionage, some can be accidental or unintentional—like emailing sensitive information to the wrong person.

What insider threats could target your organization?

Employees could join your financial institution with the sole intention of facilitating money laundering. After passing background checks and spending months learning your processes, they may attempt to manipulate transaction records to mask transactions involving illicit funds. This insider activity poses a significant regulatory risk, leading to substantial fines and severe reputational damage.

Utilities employees have access to sensitive information about energy grids, water systems and other critical infrastructure. Foreign governments may enlist individuals within utilities companies to gather information about infrastructure designs, operations and vulnerabilities for intelligence purposes. Such a breach could compromise national security and disrupt vital services.

Telecommunications companies hold vast amounts of customer data, making them attractive targets. An insider with access to detailed customer call logs could target specific individuals to understand their behaviours, contacts and communication patterns. This information can then be exfiltrated to foreign adversaries interested in using it for economic advantage or blackmail, jeopardizing customer privacy and trust.

Government and public-sector organizations are particularly vulnerable to insider threats involving foreign espionage and political subversion. Insiders may be influenced by foreign entities to access sensitive national security information or sway policy decisions to serve external interests. These activities can undermine national security, destabilize political processes and compromise the integrity of government operations.

Criminals can exploit highly sensitive patient data for malicious purposes. A health-care employee, collaborating with external actors, could leak the medical records of high-profile individuals—compromising patient privacy and creating legal and financial risks, including costly lawsuits and substantial reputational damage.

What links these diverse threats is a common target: data. Many threat actors seek to access and exploit valuable information for economic gain or to inflict harm. The consequences of such breaches can be severe, leading to financial loss, brand damage, competitive disadvantage, regulatory non-compliance and jeopardized employee safety.

A centralized approach can efficiently and effectively combat these risks. Bringing together HR, legal, IT, financial crime and other departments helps you prevent, detect and respond to the full spectrum of insider threats—strengthening your risk posture, improving alignment with regulators and enhancing customer trust.

How mature is your insider threat program?

To elevate the maturity of your insider threat program to the same level as anti-fraud initiatives, it’s crucial to look beyond traditional cybersecurity and data loss prevention measures.

Consider the following questions to assess your insider threat program:

To what extent are you engaging internal stakeholders beyond cybersecurity and IT?

Insider threat management can be fragmented, with different departments handling various aspects independently. Cybersecurity might focus on data loss, corporate security on employee safety and compliance teams on financial crimes such as money laundering. Creating a coordinated ecosystem where these departments collaborate can foster a more effective and unified approach to managing insider threats.

What steps have you taken to define roles and responsibilities?

Without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, you risk missing crucial insider threat indicators. Individual activities—like an employee logging in at 3 a.m.—might not signify a threat on their own. But these activities could indicate heightened risk when combined with other behaviours, such as frequent conflicts at work or unexplained absences. Effectively analyzing these patterns requires gathering and synthesizing data from designated individuals within various departments.

How many scenarios have you incorporated?

It can be tempting to develop dozens of scenarios to address various insider threats. While this approach appears comprehensive, an overly broad insider threat program can quickly exhaust your budget with limited return on investment. Prioritizing the most critical scenarios can enhance your organization’s resource allocation and security posture.

Does your focus extend beyond privileged IT workers?

Insider threat programs that concentrate on IT workers and data loss prevention can miss other serious risks. Insiders include employees, contractors, interns and third-party providers with risk factors such as poor performance, histories of violence, links to foreign governments or plans to join competing companies. Considering a broader group of insiders helps your organization account for new risks and enhance overall security.

Steps to developing an efficient and effective insider threat program

Integrating industry-specific leading practices and established models helps you build a robust insider threat program. Focusing on the following four pillars allows you to effectively mitigate risks, enhance security and protect your organization’s most valuable assets.

1. Strengthen governance, policies and processes

Your organization likely has controls in place to mitigate high-risk threats like a rogue IT employee uploading malware to a company laptop. But these scenarios may not always be labeled as insider threats. Explicitly including insider threats in corporate governance documentation establishes a clear tone from the top and signals a commitment to addressing these issues. This approach aligns your program with your corporate culture and defines processes to consistently apply insider policies, including a standardized investigation process.

The success of an insider threat program can hinge on having a senior management stakeholder who can rally key departments—including HR, legal, compliance, data protection and financial crimes—to contribute the necessary processes, technology and people. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities within governance documentation establishes accountability and helps each department understand its specific role in managing insider threats.

Documented policies also foster consistent prevention efforts. For example, HR policies may mandate tailored employee background checks based on seniority, aligning degrees of scrutiny to the employee’s level of access and potential risk.

2. Inventory and analyze insider threats

Successful insider threat programs typically start with a manageable number of scenarios—often 10 to 15—prioritized based on industry-specific considerations and existing high-risk user populations and data assets.

Narrowing your focus to the highest risks within your organization helps you build specific and manageable scenarios and develop well-defined processes before you expand your efforts. For example, starting with a scenario involving an employee sending high-risk emails helps you evaluate whether the necessary tools and controls are in place to monitor and address this specific activity. This targeted approach prevents you from being overwhelmed by broader, harder-to-solve issues, such as tracking all employee access logs, and lets you allocate resources more efficiently.

3. Take advantage of existing technology investments

Integrating existing tools, particularly cybersecurity solutions, into your insider threat program increases the return on your technology investments and quickly strengthens your defences by using data you already collect. Layering this cyber data with additional information from existing systems, such as access card controls or HR records, can create a comprehensive view of potential threats.

Advanced tools specifically designed for insider threat management can complement this approach. The ideal solution lets you build rules and alerts that identify high-priority cases, feeding integrated data—such as cyber, legal and HR information—into a unified case management system. This prioritization reduces the need for manual reviews, helping you concentrate resources on your most critical threats.

4. Equip your workforce to detect and prevent insider threats

Encouraging employees to report activities that seem suspicious or out of the ordinary can provide valuable insider threat intelligence. But first, your employees need to know what to look for and how to respond.

Building insider threat scenarios into tailored, role-specific training programs helps foster this awareness. This foundational knowledge can aid investigators by helping employees feel confident in recognizing and reporting potential threats.

Build trust to protect and power your business

A centralized insider threat program that integrates governance, threat analysis, technology and workforce training strengthens your overall risk posture. It helps create a secure work environment for employees while enhancing compliance with existing and emerging insider threat regulations.

Importantly, an effective and efficient insider threat program helps you focus on what matters to build trust that protects and powers your reputation. For example, consider the results of our Global Consumer Preferences in Banking Survey: respondents prioritized highly secure and trustworthy services above all other attributes and offerings from their banks, with 89% ranking them as important.

These expectations for data security extend beyond banking and are a common demand across industries. Developing a comprehensive insider threat program provides an opportunity to get ahead of changing customer expectations and build greater loyalty by showing you’re doing what’s right and doing it well.