Insider Threats come in many different shapes and forms and can be a frustrating problem to diagnose. Adding to the problem is the fact that even the most reliable and seemingly harmless employees can change in an instant and pose a threat. Protecting your company against these sometimes-unpredictable actors requires an understanding of the various profiles that exist and their motivations.

At RSA 2019, we conducted a survey that netted 733 respondents along with interviews between Javvad Malik, former security advocate at AT&T Cybersecurity, and security experts. The full results are in his comprehensive and informative research report. Following are a few highlights.

The US Department of Labor states that most people work an average of eight hours a day, but the question is, how many of those hours are productive? Employee productivity has been getting a lot of attention lately, and some studies show that workers spend only three hours per day on work tasks. Even if that figure is somewhat exaggerated, the point is that your employees may be busy with unproductive activities while they are on the job.

One day, a contractor working for an internet service provider decided to sabotage the company by disabling internet connectivity for all customers. Unfortunately, the employee's attack was successful, and the disruption lasted three weeks. This attack cost the company tens of thousands in remediation costs and left many customers struggling to navigate a world without the internet.

Human beings have been dubbed as one of the most significant risks when it comes to cyber security in organizations. Behind every breach is a human or entity orchestrating an attack to make it happen. Within the affected organization, there is usually a human action that leads to the success of the attack.

A few years ago, a news story about a man who was being paid six figures to watch cat videos went viral. Unfortunately, his company didn’t realize that this is what they were paying him to do all day. How did this happen? The employee, whom we’ll refer to as “John,” worked for a company in the US and was getting paid six figures as a developer.

A lot could happen within 100 days. One could start a new company, travel around the world or train for a marathon. One hundred days is also around the average time that attackers spend frolicking around compromised networks before being detected. For countries in Europe, Middle East, and Africa the number goes up to 175, or almost half of a year. To make matters worse, the longer a breach remains undetected the more expensive it becomes.

Once upon a time, protecting critical data assets meant keeping printed confidential information in locked boxes labeled top secret. As long as these boxes were kept in secured areas, all was well. Today, information has no such physical boundaries. Network perimeters and firewalls have become the new walls, and data classification schemas are the new box labels. This shift led to an evolution in how companies protected their data from leaving their environments.