A survey of 310 IT security professionals taken at the Infosecurity Europe trade show by Imperva. The survey found that when it comes to insider threats, over half (58 percent) of the IT security professionals were deeply concerned about careless users who unwittingly put their organization’s data at risk.

1. The Weakest Link: Insider Threats
and Cyber Security
A survey of 310 cyber security pros

2. Threats from insiders, while not as common in
breaches as external actors, are still significant and
damaging. According to the 2017 Verizon Data
Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), insider threats
account for 15 percent of breaches and often take
months or years to detect.

3. 56%
22%
22%
Very
Somewhat
Not at all
Don’t Know (0%)
In Terms of Cyber Security, How Worried Are
You About Insider Threats?

4. Does Your Company Have a Solution in
Place to Addresses Insider Threats?
85% Yes
14% No
1% Don’t Know

5. Which Type of Insider Threats are Most
Worrisome?
Careless User
Insiders who
inadvertently put
sensitive data at risk
59%
Malicious User
Insiders whose credentials
are stolen, or unknowingly
introduce malware into the
enterprise
19%
Compromised
User
Insiders who deliberately
steal or destroy company
assets
22%

6. What Makes Detecting Insider Threats the
Most Difficult?
Lack of staff to analyze permissions data on employee access
Lack of tools to monitor employee and other insiders' activities
More company assets on the network/ cloud
More employees, contractors, business partners have access to our network
44%
22%
20%
14%

7. Regarding Investigating Insider Threats,
What is the Most Time-consuming Task?
Managing too many
security alerts
55%
Collecting information
from diverse security
tools
16%
Forensic or
incident analysis
15%
Tuning security tools
14%

8. If Machine Learning Solutions Helped to
Address Insider Threats, How Much Time
Would This Save Weekly?

9. Regarding Access to Files, How is
Permission Granted to Employees?
By department
39%
By job level
35%
By project
26%

10. Regarding Access to Internal Data and Files,
Do you Review User Permissions to Ensure
Access is Appropriate for the User’s Job
Function?
18%
27%
17%
34%
4%
75-100% of the time
50-75% of the time
25-50% of the time
0-25% of the time
Don’t know

11. “Because users have legitimate access to
enterprise data, threats from the inside
can be present for long periods of time
before finally being detected. What’s
more, costs associated with loss of data
can run in the millions and lead to
customer loss, brand damage and stock
price decline.”
- Terry Ray, Imperva CTO

12. “Challenges of Insider Threat Detection”
See the
Imperva
Video Blog: