According to a new survey, the cloud not only makes enterprises vulnerable to insider attacks, it makes those attacks even more difficult to detect.
In the newly released 2019 Insider Threat Report from Cybersecurity Insiders and Securonix, thirty-nine percent of cybersecurity professionals identified cloud storage and file sharing apps as the most vulnerable to insider attacks. In addition, 56 percent believe detecting insider attacks has become significantly to somewhat harder since migrating to the cloud. Despite this risk, only 40 percent of organizations say they monitor user behavior across their cloud footprint.
The report details the types of insider threats, motivations for insider attacks, which data is the most vulnerable, and identifies which insiders pose the biggest security risk to an organization—59 percent say it’s privileged IT users or admins, followed by contractors/service providers/temporary workers at 52 percent.
Other key findings of the report include:
- 21 percent of organizations have experienced more than five insider attacks in the past 12 months
- 70 percent of organizations confirm insider attacks have become more frequent in the past 12 months
- 68 percent of organizations feel moderately to extremely vulnerable to insider attacks
- 56 percent of organizations say their monitoring, detecting and responding to insider threats is only somewhat effective or worse
- The top motivations for insider threat were fraud, monetary gain, and IP theft, followed by corporate sabotage, and espionage
“Six years ago the Snowden incident sent a wake-up call to enterprises and government agencies across the globe that risky insiders are a threat hidden in plain sight, but the cloud has exponentially increased the insider threat attack surface,” said Shareth Ben, Insider Threat SME at Securonix. “The benefits of moving to the cloud are obvious, but along with that comes an increased need for security. It’s not enough to guard the network perimeter because the perimeter has become more porous. Organizations need to take a close look inside, decide what’s most important to them, and put in place an insider threat program that incorporates, people, process, and technology.”
The 2019 Insider Threat Report reveals challenges facing organizations, how IT and security professionals are dealing with risky insiders, and how organizations are preparing to better protect their critical data and IT infrastructure. The report is based on a survey of more than 300 cybersecurity professionals and was produced by Cybersecurity Insiders and sponsored by Securonix, Inc.
The report is available for download from Securonix’s website (registration required).
