In an era of Edward Snowden and other high-profile data exfiltration incidents, such as last year’s Saudi Aramco breach, perhaps it’s unsurprising that only 9% of businesses in a recent survey from Ovum said that they feel safe from insider threats.
Insider threats are no longer only made up of traditional insiders with legitimate access rights who abuse their positions to steal data for personal gain. Privileged users who maintain systems and networks are now an additional concern, as their roles typically require access to all data accessible from systems to perform their work.
In the study from industry analyst Ovum, nearly half of UK-based respondents (42%) acknowledged it is these privileged users (system administrators, database administrators, network administrators, and so on) who pose the biggest risk to their organizations.
