Innovators
What Happens When Our Greatest Cybersecurity Threats Come From Inside?
By Visual Capitalist
January 19, 2017
•1 min read
Is it insiders or outsiders that pose the greatest threat to organizations? The answer seems to be both, and for very different reasons.
Insiders or Outsiders?
Outside threats such as cybercriminals, nation state-sponsored attacks, competition-sponsored attacks, and hacktivists are certainly more sophisticated in their approaches, but they also lack the credentials and information that insiders may hold. For that reason, the most likely root cause of data breaches involve both insider and outsider threats together.
Strictly in terms of costs, it’s malicious insider attacks that pose the biggest cybersecurity threat to organizations. When weighted for attack frequency, the average annualized cost of such an attack is $144,542 per year according to the Ponemon Institute.
This puts it above DoS attacks, but by a relatively small margin:
Type of cyberattack | Avg. cost per attack, weighted by frequency |
---|---|
Malicious insiders | $144,542 |
Denial of services | $126,545 |
Web-based attacks | $96,424 |
Phishing & social engineering | $85,959 |
Malicious code | $81,500 |
Stolen devices | $33,565 |
Malware | $7,378 |
Viruses, worms, trojans | $1,900 |
Botnets | $1,075 |
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