When people think about cybersecurity threats, they often imagine external hackers who infiltrate their networks. However, some of the most harmful violations arise within the organization. Whether you’re negligent or malicious, insiders can put your organization at critical cybersecurity risks.
According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report, 57% of businesses experience more than 20 insider-related security incidents a year, with human error involved in 68% of data breaches. This will result in Insider Attack being the highest cost per attack, following the 2024 cost of IBM Security’s data breach reporting.
What is the insider threat?
The insider threat arises from within the organization. This is the possibility that people who are granted access to critical systems may misuse access and harm the organization. The worst part is that insiders are already within your IT boundaries and are familiar with your internal security protocols.
Insider threats fall into three main categories:
Malicious Insider – Employees or contractors will intentionally abuse access for financial interests, sabotage, IP theft, or espionage. Negligent Insider – Careless employees mistreat their qualifications, share their passwords, or violate their cybersecurity policy. Insider breached – A legal user violated by an external attacker.
The consequences of insider threats range from financial losses and reputational damage to serious penalties for violating critical cybersecurity laws, regulations and standards such as GDPR, NIS2 or HIPAA.
What makes insider threats particularly dangerous is the level of access that a particular user has within the organization. Not all accounts are equal. Privileged accounts are especially risky.
For example, an insider threat occurred within the US Treasury Department in December 2024 when a member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team was incorrectly granted promoted access to a critical payment system. The Doge team had the ability to read and modify sensitive system code, which could lead to serious consequences for the US Treasury and its clients.
This situation underscores the need for a robust privileged access management (PAM) solution to prevent unauthorized access and potential system compromises.
Why Privileged Accounts Are Responsible
Higher privileged accounts are one of the most desirable targets for both insiders and external attackers. These accounts often have access to sensitive systems, allowing users to change configurations and interact with important data. Mismanaged can lead to privilege escalation, data delamination, operational disruption, and other security incidents.
Implementing PAM best practices and using dedicated solutions allows organizations to significantly reduce attack surfaces and minimize the risk of insider-driven violations.
Exploring Pam’s transformational impact on businesses in a white paper: The role of Pam in shaping the 2025 leadership agenda by cybersecurity expert and former Gartner lead analyst Jonathan Care.
How PAM helps mitigate insider threats
Privileged Access Management Solutions grant organizations the authority to effectively control, monitor and protect privileged access. Here’s how PAM can help neutralize insider risk:
1. Identifying and managing privileged accounts
A common challenge for organizations is the lack of visibility into existing privileged accounts. This creates a security blind spot. If you are unaware of privileged accounts in your environment, you cannot secure them.
Advanced PAM solutions help automate the discovery of privileged accounts and identify hidden, isolated accounts in your environment. Continuously scanning and onboarding unmanaged privileged accounts can significantly reduce overlooked access points that bad actors may exploit.
2. Supporting the principle of least privilege
One of the central tenets of PAM is the principle of least privilege (POLP) that ensures that employees, contractors, or service accounts are granted only the access necessary to perform their duties. POLP ensures that a single user does not have unlimited standing privileges. This significantly reduces the risk of misuse of privilege.
PAM Solutions helps you enforce POLP by allowing security teams to dynamically adjust access based on user roles and responsibilities.
3. Implementation of Just-in-Time Pam
Permanent privileged access increases the attack surface. For example, developers working on critical updates may need to temporarily access the production server. However, if you keep high privileges in place after the update is complete, this can create unnecessary security risks. In the future, attackers can exploit these privileges to gain unauthorized access and move sideways within the network.
PAM solutions like Syteca allow on-demand privileged access to certain tasks and revoke elevation of access upon completion.
4. Implementing an Identity-First Approach
According to Gartner’s 2025 ID and Access Management Primer (subscription required), the ID first approach is essential for modern organizational security. Adopting this approach means moving from static network security measures to a continuous adaptive and zero trust approach.
By applying multifactorial authentication to all access points, organizations can minimize unauthorized access and lateral movement across the system.
5. Protecting remote access
As remote work and third-party collaboration become essential, secure access to sensitive systems for external users is essential. PAM solutions help you verify your identity and grant remote users time-limited task-specific access to the system.
This level of control can protect critical systems, even when critical systems are accessed from a wide range of locations outside the corporate network.
6. Protect your credentials with arches and rotations
Simple, reused, or improperly stored passwords remain large, weak links for many organizations. PAM solutions can protect 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 IT teams time by eliminating manual password resets and reducing password-related service requests.
7. Monitoring privileged activities
Without proper monitoring of privileged user sessions, organizations are unable to detect early signs of insider threats, resulting in difficult and costly data breaches.
With PAM solutions with User Activity Monitoring (UAM), security teams oversee all interactions with critical systems in real time and discover events that represent insider threats. Comprehensive cybersecurity platforms like Syteca can flag potential insider threats by sending real-time notifications to security teams.
8. Automate insider threat response
The automation provided by PAM Solutions significantly reduces the time organizations can detect and respond to insider threats, minimizing potential financial, operational and reputational damage.
For example, Syteca not only sends real-time alerts about unusual user activity, but also automatically blocks suspicious users, alerts them with messages, and blocks unauthorized USB devices.
Beyond the insider threat: Other benefits of PAM
Mitigating insider threats is a compelling reason for adopting PAM solutions, but the benefits go far beyond insider threat management.
Improved operational efficiency. Automating access management with PAM tools reduces manual intervention and streamlines IT operations. Automation speeds up access provisioning and provisioning, reduces management overhead and minimizes human error. As a result, IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives rather than on daily tasks. Streamline regulatory compliance. Many organizations need to comply with 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 compliance with standards, laws and regulations such as GDPR, PCI DSS, and NIS2. Increase employee productivity. With automated password management, secure sharing of password sharing between teams, and single sign-on capabilities, many PAM solutions minimize the time employees spend dealing with access issues. This efficiency leads to increased productivity as users can quickly access the systems they need without compromising security.
Overall, implementing a robust PAM solution not only enhances organizational security against insider threats, but also offers numerous benefits that drive operational efficiency, regulatory compliance and productivity growth. By embracing PAM, we are investing in a safe, efficient and resilient future for our organization.
Syteca: Powerful, flexible, 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. A flexible licensing scheme allows Syteca to assist control organizations of any size that interact with critical data, ensuring the right people and the right permissions at the right time.
Book a demo or request a free trial and see how Syteca can meet your specific cybersecurity needs.
About the Author: Ani Khachatryan, Chief Technology Officer of Syteca, began her journey with Syteca as a test manager. In this role, she successfully revamped the testing process and helped integrate development best practices across the company. Her strong background aimed at testing and perfection helps Ani come up with unconventional solutions to technical and operational problems, but her deep cybersecurity expertise establishes her as an industry expert.
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