Insider Threat

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Careless Insider

In any organization, the insider threat is all around you. It is not only the fired employee with ill-intent, it is every employee who clicks on a phishing link, shares a password, circumvents a policy rule or does something similar without a second thought. Careless Insiders create openings and opportunities for Malicious Outsiders in even the most well-managed networks. Most external network breaches nowadays have an insider component.

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Malicious Insider

Then there is the malicious employee, who actively seeks to steal data or money or to gum up the works. External threat actors actually spend significant resources observing and trying to cultivate potential malicious insiders in target organizations – more resources than organizations themselves spend protecting against them.

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Deepfake Employee

In the age of AI, a new insider threat actor has emerged – the employee who gets hired under false pretences, using deepfake technology to disguise their identity. The most sophisticated companies have been fooled into hiring North Korean state-sponsored deepfake employees who disguise their resume, their face, their voice to get through interviews, and then spend months pretending to work for the company, earning paychecks and exfiltrating data all the while.

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Smart Malware

The insider threat space continues to expand in the age of AI, including now smart AI-enabled malware that gets into your computer and stays there, learning to mimic the behavior of insiders such as, for example, by only exfiltrating data from your network at busy, high-traffic times of day.

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AI Agent

And a further AI-based insider threat is now agentic AI. Many companies seek to use AI agents to replace traditional workflows and even employees and teams – but who is monitoring what those agents do? Agents have been known to band together in unexpected ways, to circumvent policy and governance and security controls. If you want to use agents to replace employees, then treat agents as employees and monitor them like any other insider threat.