Insiders are not necessarily a serious threat.

According to a new study, the majority of all data breach events were caused by pure hack attempts. According to Flashpoint research, 60% of all data breach instances recorded during the first half of the year were the result of hacking. Usually, this happens when a person or a group gains unauthorized access to corporate systems.

In all, about 2,000 data breaches were reported globally in H1 2022, which is not exactly the entire number of hacking attempts. What’s significant about this research is that events caused by misconfigurations are down about 50% year on year, from 27.3 to 1.4 billion records.

Insider attacks

Insider attacks are also discussed in the paper. Apparently, just 23% of all occurrences with known origins were caused by insiders. 61 % of insider attacks were caused by data handling errors. In total, 54 insider breaches have been proven. Some of them are very minor for the corporation credit card fraud at the point of sale and others are of the high scale to the level of stealing proprietary source code and similar.

Insider attacks are frequently cited as one of the most serious hazards to businesses. Sometimes they are intentional when a disgruntled employee seeks to directly harm the company. However, most of the time they are the result of an honest mistake or negligence, for example, losing data via email by sending it to the wrong address, losing external storage devices, smartphones, laptops, or similar.

This pushes organizations to not only limit their web exposure but also to boost their efforts to prevent unwanted access as much as possible. Organizations can achieve this aim by increasing their information collection operations, strengthening their security systems, and conducting frequent audits.