Why the biggest cybersecurity threats are inside your organization

You don’t need to look farther than your own backyard when looking at the biggest security breaches that can ever hit your organization. Hackers and criminals are aplenty out there, but your high-value cyber assets are most at risk when you consider your own internal environment: your people and company insiders.

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In a 2016 report, IBM discovered that some 60 percent of all cyber attacks were performed by insiders. Of these attacks, three-quarters were out of malicious intent while the remaining one-quarter involved unsuspecting players. In a report made in 2015, it also found that human error is nearly always an element that made these breaches possible. While 23.5 percent were undertaken by inadvertent insiders versus 31.5 percent by malicious characters, a whopping 95 percent involved a person making a mistake.


To err is human, as they say. Unwitting insiders make breaches possible with anything from misaddressed emails and stolen hardware and devices to confidential data transmitted to vulnerable home systems. The greatest risks were with rather well-meaning IT administrators who can have total access to the company infrastructure – and whose small error can turn into a full-blown catastrophe for the business.

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An employee system can also be compromised when cyber criminals and fraudsters, who are adept at hijacking identities, inject malware into company systems or mount phishing attacks. Sometimes they use stolen credentials, particularly those obtained from social networks. They can elevate a particular user access within an internal system, getting further access to sensitive and valuable data.


Cybersecurity is not just guarding the perimeter and mounting a solid external defense. It’s also a war waged with an enemy within, whether a bad employee or people who need to be better informed and educated when it comes to security compliance and consciousness.


Secure Channels has innovative platforms that provide security into endpoints, applications, and networks from the inside out, offering access to your critical resources while protecting client data from breach, theft, and misuse. Learn more on this page.