Internal Incidents Cause Roughly A Quarter Of Breaches, With More Than Half Intentional

Insider risk is an ongoing concern for many organizations today. Common consequences include fraud, privacy abuses, intellectual property theft, or damage to infrastructure. Twenty-six percent of security breaches in the past 12 months were caused by an internal incident, according to Forrester’s 2022 data on security decision-makers who experienced a breach and are aware of the cause. About a third who experienced an internal incident described it as accidental, but 44% blamed malicious intent, and 23% noted a mix of both inadvertent misuse and malicious intent. Organizations must carefully build insider risk management programs that account for employee privacy and due process.