60% of Insider Threats Involve Employees Planning to Leave
Dark Reading
Kelly Sheridan
More than 80% of employees planning to leave an organization bring its data with them. These "flight-risk" individuals were involved in roughly 60% of insider threats analyzed in a new study.
Researchers analyzed more than 300 confirmed incidents as part of the "2020 Securonix Insider Threat Report." They found most insider threats involve exfiltration of sensitive data (62%), though others include privilege misuse (19%), data aggregation (9.5%), and infrastructure sabotage (5.1%). Employees planning an exit start to show so-called flight-risk behavior between two weeks and two months ahead of their last day, the researchers discovered.
Most people who exfiltrate sensitive information do so over email, a pattern detected in nearly 44% of cases. The next most-popular method is uploading the information to cloud storage websites (16%), a technique growing popular as more organizations rely on cloud collaboration software such as Box and Dropbox. Employees are also known to steal corporate information using...