For any organization, insider attacks are like a severe illness: prevention is better than the cure. Like illnesses, insiders mask their malicious actions and can harm your organization for a long time before you detect them. This harm can be in the form of a loss of data, customers, money, etc.   Planning a risk mitigation process helps to stop insider attacks at the early stages or reduce their potential damage.

Securing an organization’s sensitive data is hard, especially when the danger comes from within. A careless coworker may insecurely share credentials, an intruder may compromise an account, or a malicious insider may misuse their access rights. According to the 2020 Cost of Insider Threats Report [PDF] by IBM, 60% of organizations experienced more than 20 insider-related incidents in 2019. One promising solution to prevent insider threats is user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).