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 data downloads (10.7%), unauthorized removable devices (8.9%), and data snooping through SharePoint (8%).
Today's insider threats look different from those a few years ago, says Shareth Ben, director of Insider Threat and Cyber Threat Analytics with Securonix. Cloud tools have made it easier for employees to share files with non-business accounts, creating a challenge for security teams.
"The issue with these cloud collaboration tools, from a data leakage standpoint, is the IT admins and security operations teams don't have much visibility into what happens with respect to how users share the data," Ben explains. Most companies have adopted the cloud, or are in the process of adopting the cloud, because it's a business priority — but security is often insider threats involve employees planning leave
