When people think about cybersecurity threats, they often find out the external hackers who invaded the network. However, some of the most devastating violations stem from organizations. Whether through negligence or malicious intentions, insiders can expose your organization with significant risk of cybersecurity.
According to Verizon’s Report on Investigation by Data Violation 202457% of companies experience more than 20 incidents associated with insider per year, and the human mistake is involved in 68% of data violations. With this insider attacks lead to the highest costs, an average of $ 4.99 million for the attack, depending on 2024 g by the security of IBM.
What is insider threats?
Insider threat Starts with the organization – this is the potential for those who have authorized access to your critical access systems by harming your organization. The worst thing is that insiders are already in your perimeter and familiar with your internal security protocols, which impede their illegal activity.
Insider threats fall into three main categories:
- Malicious insiders – Employees or contractors intentionally abuse their access to financial benefits, sabotage, theft of IP or espionage.
- Careless insiders – Careless staff who are accounting for passwords, password exchange or violate cybersecurity policies.
- Compromised by insiders – legitimate users who were outlined by an external attacker.
The consequences of insider threats vary from financial losses and reputational damage to serious punishment for non -compliance with critical laws, rules, rules and standards such as GDPR, NIS2 or Hipaa.
What makes insider threats especially dangerous, this is the level of access of certain users within the organization. Not all accounts are equal – privileged accounts, in particular, are at increased risk.
For example, in December 2024, an insider threat incident occurred in the US Treasury Ministry when members of the Elon Musk government (DOGE) were mistakenly provided with increased access to critical payment systems. The DOGE team had the opportunity to read and change sensitive system codes, which could have serious consequences for the US Treasury and its customers.
This situation emphasizes the need for reliable Privileged access management (PAM) Decisions to prevent unauthorized access and potential compromises of the system.
Why are privileged accounts responsible
Increased resolutions are one of the most desirable purposes for both insiders and external attackers. These accounts often have access to sensitive systems, allowing users to change configurations and interact with critical data. When driving incorrectly, they can escalate privileges, data exports, operational disruptions and other security incidents.
By introducing the best PAM practices and using special solutions, organizations can significantly reduce the attack surface and minimize the risk of insiders.
Learn the transformation impact of PEM on businesses in the White Book Cyber Guardian: The role of Pem in forming the agenda for 2025 Cybersecurity experts and a former Gartner lead analyst Jonathan care.
As PEM helps to mitigate insider threats
Privileged access decisions allow organizations to control, control and effectively provide privileged access. Here’s how PEM helps neutralize insider risks:
1. Definition and Manage Privileged Accounts
A common problem for organizations is the lack of visibility in existing privileged accounts, which creates blind security spots. If you don’t know about some privileged accounts in your environment, you can’t provide them.
Extended PAM solutions helps automate the privileged account detection, determining the hidden and orphans accounts in your environment. Constantly scanning and aboard unmanaged privileged accounts, you can significantly reduce unpredictable access points that can be used by poor subjects.
2. Support the principle of the slightest privilege
One of the basic PAM principles is the principle of the slightest privilege (PolP), which guarantees that employees, contractors or services are provided only by Polp ensures that no user has unlimited privileges, which dramatically reduces the risk of misuse of privileges.
PAM solutions help to provide PolP, allowing security commands to dynamically adjust access depending on the roles and responsibilities of users.
3. The implementation is timely
Stable privileged access increases the surface of the attack. For example, a developer working on a critical update may need temporary access to your production servers. However, if you leave your increased resolutions after the update, it can create an unnecessary security risk. In the future, attackers can use these privileges to gain unauthorized access and move toward your network.
Of the decisions like Syteca Allow you to provide privileged access for specific tasks and withdraw increased access after completion.
4. Apply the identity of the first approach
According to Hartner Primer Management Person and Access Management for 2025 (Subscription), the first identity approach is essential for modern organizational safety. Acceptance of this approach means the transition from the static network security measures to permanent adaptive trust and zero trusted approaches that provide check and permit for user identity before accessing sensitive systems.
Applying multifactorial authentication to each access point, organizations can minimize unauthorized access and lateral movement on their systems.
5. Defense of remote access
As the distance work and cooperation of third parties became necessary, providing safe access to your sensitive systems for external users. PAM solutions can help you check users’ identity and provide distance users, time -bounds, access to your systems.
This level of control can help you ensure that your critical systems remain protected even when accessed outside your corporate network, from different places.
6. Fixing powers at vaults and rotation
Simple, re -used or incorrectly preserved passwords remain the main weak link for many organizations. PAM solutions can provide privileged credentials, keeping them in an encrypted repository and automatically updating the passwords, making impaired passwords useless over time.
Centrally password management not only increases safety, but also saves time for IT teams, eliminating hand-based passwords and reducing password-related requests.
7. Monitoring of privileged activity
Without proper supervision of the privileged user sessions, organizations may not identify early signs of insider threats, which will lead to data violations that are difficult and expensive for elimination.
Pam Solutions with user monitoring capabilities (UAM) allows security teams to control all real -time critical systems, and thus reveal events that can mean an insider threat. Complex cybersecurity platforms, such as SyTeca, can indicate potential insiders by sending real -time notifications to the security team.
8. Automation Answer Insider threat
With the help of automation provided by Pam Solutions, organizations significantly reduce time to detect and respond to insider threats, minimizing potential financial, operational and reputational damage.
For example, Syteca not only sends users’ abnormal activity alerts, but also automatically blocks suspicious users, warns them with a message and blocks the undervalued USB device.
In addition to insider threats: Other benefits PAM
While mitating insider threats is a persuasive cause of PAM decision -making, the benefits go far beyond the insider threat management.
- Increasing work efficiency. Access management automation using PAM tools reduces manual interventions and streamlines IT operations. Automation accelerates the provision and prevent access to access, reduces administrative overhead and minimizes human errors. Thus, the IT -co -nationals can focus on strategic initiatives, not ordinary tasks.
- Ordering of regulatory conservation. Many organizations must follow the cybersecurity rules that require strict access control and careful check. Pam Solutions ordering, providing detailed logging logs, simplifying the audit process and ensuring compliance with standards, laws and rules such as GDPR, PCI DSS and NIS2.
- Improving employees’ productivity. Using automated password control, safe password exchange between teams and single features, many PAM solutions minimize the time that employees carry out the case with access problems. This efficiency leads to improving productivity as users can immediately access the required systems without sacrificing security.
In general, the implementation of a reliable PAM solution not only strengthens the safety of your organization from insider threats, but also provides many benefits that provide efficiency, compliance with regulatory requirements and productivity growth. By accepting PAM, you put into a safe, efficient and elastic future for your organization.
Syteca: Powerful, flexible and cost -effective PAM
Syteca is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform that provides a holistic approach to insider prevention. It offers reliable privileged access management, expanded users’ activity monitoring, unobstructed Siem integration and support for multiple platforms. Thanks to the flexible licensing scheme, Syteca helps organizations of any size control that interact with their critical data, providing the right people the right permits at the right time.
Contact us To book a demo or request a free trial and see how Syteca can meet your specific cybersecurity needs.
About the author: neither Khachatrin, Chief Director of the Syteca Technology, started her journey to Syteca as a test manager. In this role, she successfully repaired the testing process and helped to integrate the best development practices in the company. Its strong basis in testing and aspirations for excellence helps Ani to come up with unconventional solutions on technical and prompt issues, while her deep experience in cybersecurity creates it as an expert in the industry.
