The recent Crowdstrike incident, involving a malicious employee working with threat actors, captured global attention.
When a leading security firm is impacted, it naturally raises a confronting question:
If it can happen there, what does that mean for everyone else?
It is easy to view this as a story about advanced threat actors targeting specialised security vendors. But the broader lesson is far more relevant:
Insider risk isn’t limited to advanced threat actors or high-profile security firms. It affects every organisation and every employee.
Insider risk exists on a spectrum. At one end are well-intentioned mistakes arising from everyday work, complexity, and incomplete context. At the other are deliberate acts—sometimes by a disgruntled individual, and increasingly through external actors seeking to exploit legitimate access via verified identities.
A defining shift in modern risk is that attackers are no longer focused on “hacking” systems.
They’re not breaking in. They’re signing in.
Two Sides of Insider Risk, One Shared Impact
In modern environments, insider risk typically presents in two broad forms. While motivations differ, the operational and business outcomes often converge across areas such as data exposure, service disruption, regulatory impact, and reputational harm.
1) Inadvertent Insider Risk
These scenarios arise from normal work across the organisation and typically require only routine access. They are the predictable outcome of a digitally enabled world that demands fast collaboration and constant connectivity—often colliding with real human constraints such as attention, context switching, time pressure, and awareness.
Typical patterns include:
- Misdirected communication: sending information to the wrong recipient or channel
- Oversharing: overly permissive sharing links or access settings
- Unapproved application usage: placing sensitive content into public tools—including AI platforms or cloud services—without full awareness of risk
- Accuracy issues: outdated or incorrect information used in customer-facing documents, reporting, or decisions
- Misconfiguration: well-intentioned changes to systems, access policies, or cloud services that unintentionally expose data or disrupt critical services
These incidents are typically unintentional—but the impact can be just as disruptive as deliberate misuse.
High-profile example:
In 2023, Samsung Electronics experienced an inadvertent insider risk incident when engineers uploaded internal source code and other confidential information into the publicly accessible AI chatbot ChatGPT while attempting to troubleshoot proprietary code and summarise internal meeting notes. As a result, Samsung banned the use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools internally, citing security concerns that sensitive company data could be stored or exposed outside the organisation.
2) Intentional Insider Risk
Intentional insider risk involves deliberate misuse of legitimate access by an individual who intends to cause harm or extract value. This may be driven by grievance, financial motivation, ideology, or opportunism.
Traditionally, this has taken the form of a malicious or disgruntled employee abusing their position. Increasingly, modern insider risk amplifies scenarios where external threat actors compromise, coerce, or recruit employees—turning valid credentials into an attack pathway. In both cases, intent is the defining factor.
Examples include:
- A disgruntled employee exfiltrating customer data or intellectual property prior to departure
- An employee abusing access to bypass safeguards, disable controls, or conceal activity
- An employee being coerced or recruited by an external threat actor to provide credentials, screenshots, or internal system access
The CrowdStrike incident reinforces a critical reality:
External actors + verified access create insider-like risk
Once operating within expected access patterns, attackers encounter fewer enforcement checkpoints than they would through overt attack paths. This blurs the traditional boundary between “external attacker” and “insider,” shifting emphasis to the risks inherent in verified identities and legitimate access paths.
Why Modern Work Amplifies Insider Risk
Insider risk is not new—and it certainly does not affect the IT domain alone. However, the modern digital environment amplifies it by creating more access, more pathways, and more speed than most organisations are structurally designed to govern.
- Online applications—including collaboration platforms and AI tools—are readily available, rapidly creating shadow usage and new risk pathways that previously sat behind network or physical boundaries.
- Information is proliferated and highly accessible, from internal data stores to external sources that may be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate.
- The balance between productivity and assurance has shifted: increased automation, digitally enabled workflows, and constant connectivity can reduce verification, review, and quality checks—particularly when employees are managing context switching, workload, and cognitive fatigue.
- Employees are more discoverable than ever, with platforms like LinkedIn increasing exposure to recruitment, coercion, and social engineering.
A Modern Insider Risk Strategy
Effective insider risk management is not solved with technology alone.
It begins with how people work and how organisations design processes around that reality. People and process establish expectations and reduce friction. Technology then acts as the guardrails and safety net—reinforcing good behaviour, constraining misuse, and detecting risk when assumptions fail.
People and Process: Where Insider Risk Starts
Insider risk emerges from everyday decisions made across the organisation. A practical strategy focuses on enabling secure behaviour without negatively impacting innovation, productivity or culture.
Key foundations include:
- Seamless processes that reduce friction: secure workflows must be easier than insecure workarounds. Complexity creates bypasses and increases inadvertent risk.
- Human-aware culture: design for real constraints (workload, context switching, time pressure) and build balanced capability through operational structures, practical guidance, and support.
- Clear expectations and acceptable-use guardrails: employees should understand what information can be shared, where it can go, and how tools may be used safely—especially in online and AI-enabled workflows.
- Authoritative sources of information: defining trusted sources for relevant information reduces the risk of inaccurate or outdated information creating real-world impact.
- Access gates, approvals, and escalation paths: tiered responsibility models aligned to access reduce single points of exposure and provide safe escalation when uncertainty arises.
- Appropriate vetting and recurring assurance: proportionate screening for sensitive roles, combined with periodic reassessment, helps manage intentional risk without creating a culture of distrust.
- A culture of early reporting: encouraging employees to raise mistakes or unusual approaches early—without fear of blame—allows issues to be addressed before impact escalates.
These measures do not eliminate risk—but they shape behaviour and reduce the conditions in which risk thrives.
Technology: Guardrails, Enforcement, and Safety Nets
Technology is where insider risk strategies become operational at scale. It enforces expectations, constrains exposure, and provides visibility when legitimate access is misused—whether accidentally or deliberately.
Key control areas include:
- Access control and identity protection: strong authentication, conditional access, and role-based access reduce the impact of credential compromise, excessive access, or inadvertent exposure.
- Application control and visibility: governing sanctioned and unsanctioned online applications limits data sprawl and reduces exposure through shadow tools and unmanaged AI usage.
- Data protection and sharing guardrails: controls such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and restricted sharing policies help prevent accidental oversharing and deliberate data exfiltration across areas such as email, collaboration platforms, and cloud services.
- Behaviour and access analytics: detecting unusual access and activity patterns or abnormal data movement across all roles.
- Change and configuration safeguards: approval workflows, alerting, and policy-based controls reduce the likelihood and/or impact of misconfigurations or misuse.
Technology does not solve insider risk on its own—but it provides consistent guardrails and early detection at scale.
How These Elements Work Together
Consider a high-risk moment: an employee exiting the organisation.
Inadvertent scenario
An employee preparing to leave copies information they believe to be non-sensitive—for example, transferring files to a USB drive or personal cloud storage. Without clear exit guidance or structured processes, this can unintentionally include material that should remain internal.
- People and process provide clarity on what information can be retained, what must remain internal, and how exit requirements are communicated and enforced.
- Technology reinforces this through access adjustments and guardrails that prevent sensitive information from being copied, uploaded, or shared externally.
The result: a well-intentioned action is guided into a secure outcome.
Intentional or compromised-access scenario
In a more deliberate case, an employee attempts to exfiltrate sensitive information prior to departure—or an external actor attempts the same through compromised credentials.
- Access controls limit what can be reached.
- Application and data controls detect or block transfer attempts involving sensitive content.
- Behaviour analytics surface activity that deviates from normal patterns.
This is where technology provides consistent enforcement and early detection—supporting people and process when conditions are ambiguous, time-critical, or intentionally adversarial.
A Universal Risk, A Practical Response
The CrowdStrike incident is a high-profile reminder that insider-driven events can occur even in mature environments. But the underlying message is broader:
Insider risk is universal because it is rooted in everyday work and verified access.
Inadvertent incidents persist as part of normal operations. Intentional threats remain a real concern—and increasingly intersect with external actors who seek to exploit valid identities rather than break through technical defences.
The objective is not to constrain people or erode organisational culture. It is to design environments where secure behaviour is the default, exposure is limited by design, and risk is surfaced early.
When people, process, and technology operate together, insider risk becomes a manageable business reality—without slowing the organisation or undermining culture.
