When people think of cybersecurity threats, they often picture external hackers breaking into networks. However, some of the most damaging breaches stem from within organizations. Whether through negligence or malicious intent, insiders can expose your organization to significant cybersecurity risks.
According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, 57% of companies experience over 20 insider-related security incidents a year, with human error involved in 68% of data breaches. With that, insider attacks result in the highest costs, averaging USD 4.99 million per attack, as per the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security.
What are insider threats?
An insider threat originates from within an organization – it’s the potential for anyone with authorized access to your critical systems to misuse their access, harming your organization. The worst part is that insiders are already within your IT perimeter and are familiar with your internal security protocols, which makes their illicit activity harder to detect.
Insider threats fall into three primary categories:
- Malicious insiders – employees or contractors intentionally abusing their access for financial gain, sabotage, IP theft, or espionage.
- Negligent insiders – careless employees mishandling credentials, sharing passwords, or violating cybersecurity policies.
- Compromised insiders – legitimate users who have been outsmarted by an external attacker.
The consequences of insider threats range from financial losses and reputational damage to severe penalties for non-compliance with critical cybersecurity laws, regulations, and standards like GDPR, NIS2, or HIPAA.
What makes insider threats especially dangerous is the level of access certain users have within an organization. Not all accounts are made equal — privileged accounts, in particular, pose an increased risk.
For example, in December 2024, an insider threat incident occurred within the U.S. Treasury Department when members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team were mistakenly granted elevated access to critical payment systems. The DOGE team had the ability to read and modify sensitive system codes, which could lead to serious consequences for the U.S. Treasury Department and its clients.
This situation underscores the necessity for robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions to prevent unauthorized access and potential system compromises.
Why privileged accounts become a liability
Accounts with elevated permissions are among the most desired targets for both insiders and external attackers. These accounts often have access to sensitive systems, enabling users to modify configurations and interact with critical data. When mismanaged, they can lead to privilege escalation, data exfiltration, operational disruptions, and other security incidents.
By implementing PAM best practices and using dedicated solutions, organizations can considerably reduce their attack surface and minimize the risk of insider-driven breaches.
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How PAM helps mitigate insider threats
Privileged access management solutions empower organizations to control, monitor, and secure privileged access effectively. Here’s how PAM helps neutralize insider risks:
1. Identifying and managing privileged accounts
A common challenge for organizations is the lack of visibility into existing privileged accounts, which creates security blind spots. If you’re not aware of some privileged accounts within your environment, you can’t secure them.
Advanced PAM solutions help automate privileged account discovery, identifying hidden and orphaned accounts within your environment. By continuously scanning and onboarding unmanaged privileged accounts, you can significantly reduce overlooked access points that could be exploited by bad actors.
2. Supporting the principle of least privilege
One of the core tenets of PAM is the principle of least privilege (PoLP), which ensures that employees, contractors, or service accounts are only granted access they require to perform their duties. PoLP ensures that no single user has unrestricted, standing privileges, which drastically reduces the risk of privilege misuse.
PAM solutions help enforce PoLP by allowing security teams to dynamically adjust access based on users’ roles and responsibilities.
3. Implementing just-in-time PAM
Persistent privileged access increases the attack surface. For example, a developer working on a critical update may need temporary access to your production servers. However, if you leave their elevated permissions in place after the update is complete, this may create an unnecessary security risk. In the future, attackers can exploit those privileges to gain unauthorized access and move laterally within your network.
PAM solutions like Syteca enable you to grant on-demand privileged access for specific tasks and revoke elevated access upon their completion.
4. Enforcing identity-first approach
According to Gartner’s Identity and Access Management Primer for 2025 (subscription required), an identity-first approach is essential for modern organizational security. Adopting this approach means shifting from static network security measures to continuous adaptive trust and zero trust approaches that ensure user identities are verified and authorized before accessing sensitive systems.
By applying multi-factor authentication to every access point, organizations can minimize unauthorized access and lateral movement across their systems.
5. Protecting remote access
As remote work and third-party collaborations have become essential, ensuring secure access to your sensitive systems for external users is vital. PAM solutions can help you verify user identities and grant remote users time-limited, task-specific access to your systems.
This level of control can help you ensure that your critical systems remain protected even when accessed from outside your corporate network, from diverse locations.
6. Securing credentials with vaulting and rotation
Simple, reused, or improperly stored passwords remain a major weak link for many organizations. PAM solutions can secure privileged credentials by storing them in an encrypted vault and automatically updating passwords, making compromised passwords useless over time.
Centralized password management not only enhances security but also saves time for IT teams by eliminating manual password resets and reducing password-related service requests.
7. Monitoring privileged activity
Without proper oversight of privileged user sessions, organizations can fail to detect early signs of insider threats, resulting in data breaches that are hard and costly to remediate.
PAM solutions with user activity monitoring (UAM) capabilities enable security teams to oversee all interactions with critical systems in real time and, thus, spot events that could signify an insider threat. Comprehensive cybersecurity platforms like Syteca can flag potential insider threats by sending real-time notifications to security teams.
8. Automating insider threat response
With the automation provided by PAM solutions, organizations significantly reduce the time to detect and respond to insider threats, minimizing potential financial, operational, and reputational damage.
For instance, Syteca not only sends real-time alerts on abnormal user activity but also automatically blocks suspicious users, warns them with a message, and blocks unapproved USB devices.
Beyond insider threats: The other benefits of PAM
While mitigating insider threats is a compelling reason to adopt PAM solutions, the advantages extend far beyond insider threat management.
- Enhancing operational efficiency. Automating access management with PAM tools reduces manual interventions and streamlines IT operations. Automation speeds up the provisioning and de-provisioning of access rights, reduces administrative overhead, and minimizes human errors. Consequently, IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine tasks.
- Streamlining regulatory compliance. Many organizations must adhere to cybersecurity regulations that require strict access controls and thorough audits. PAM solutions streamline compliance by providing detailed logs of privileged account activities, simplifying the auditing process, and ensuring adherence to standards, laws, and regulations such as the GDPR, PCI DSS, and NIS2.
- Boosting employee productivity. With automated password management, secure password sharing between teams, and single sign-on features, many PAM solutions minimize the time employees spend dealing with access issues. This efficiency leads to increased productivity, as users can access necessary systems promptly without compromising security.
Overall, implementing a robust PAM solution not only fortifies your organization’s security against insider threats but also delivers a multitude of benefits that drive operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and productivity growth. By embracing PAM, you’re investing in a secure, efficient, and resilient future for your organization.
Syteca: Powerful, flexible, and cost-effective PAM
Syteca is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform that provides a holistic approach to insider threat prevention. It offers robust privileged access management, advanced user activity monitoring, seamless SIEM integration, and support for multiple platforms. With a flexible licensing scheme, Syteca helps organizations of any size control who interacts with their critical data, ensuring the right people have the right permissions at the right time.
Contact us to book a demo or request a free trial and see how Syteca can meet your specific cybersecurity needs.
About the author: Ani Khachatryan, Syteca’s Chief Technology Officer, started her journey in Syteca as a test manager. In this role, she successfully renovated the testing processes and helped integrate development best practices across the company. Her strong background in testing and striving for perfection helps Ani come up with unconventional solutions to technical and operational issues, while her deep expertise in cybersecurity establishes her as an expert in the industry.