How to Build an Insider Threat Program [10-step Checklist]

An effective insider threat program is a core part of any modern cybersecurity strategy. Having controls in place to detect and respond to insider attacks is necessary to protect your organization’s sensitive data and critical systems. It’s also a requirement of many IT regulations, standards, and laws. An insider threat program can enhance your overall cybersecurity and support compliance with HIPAA, PCI DSS, and NIS2, among others. 

In this article, we’ll shed light on the main requirements of an insider threat program and share the best tips on how to build an insider threat program.

What is an insider threat program?

Creating an effective corporate insider threat program can help you detect insider threats, prevent them, and mitigate their consequences. An insider threat program is “a coordinated group of capabilities under centralized management that is organized to detect and prevent the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information”, according to The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53. The term “insider threat program” is often referred to interchangeably as an insider threat management framework.

What functions do insider threat programs aim to fulfill? They can help organizations detect insider threats, respond to them, remediate their consequences, and improve insider threat awareness. But before we get into the details, let’s examine why it’s worth investing your time and money in such a program.

Benefits of an insider threat program

Though external and opportunistic attackers are considered the main sources of cybersecurity breaches, there are many reasons why insider threats are even more dangerous and difficult to detect:

• Insiders know your networks, processes, and security measures, enabling them to surreptitiously hide any malicious activity.
• Insiders are familiar with your valuable data and where it’s located, so they can easily initiate a data breach.
• Insiders have legitimate access, making it difficult to differentiate between normal and malicious activities.

Due to these factors, insider attacks can persist for years, leading to remediation costs that balloon way out of proportion. The 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Report by the Ponemon Institute states that the total average annual cost of an insider-related incident in 2024 was $17.4 million, which is $1.1 million more than in 2023.

Insider threats are undeniably becoming more and more expensive and difficult to detect. Therefore, establishing an insider risk program is critical for your organization.

Creating an efficient insider threat program provides organizations with valuable benefits:

• Early detection of insider threats: An insider threat program can help you spot cyber threat indicators before they cause harm to your organization.
• Compliance with standards, laws, and regulations: An insider threat program can help your organization pass compliance audits and demonstrate adherence to SOX, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, DORA, and NIS2. 
• Fast and efficient response to insider attacks: An insider threat program thoroughly outlines the procedures, tools, and personnel required for mitigating a threat. Armed with a clear course of action, employees can promptly handle cybersecurity incidents.
• Reduced costs of an insider attack: An insider threat program maximizes your chances of deterring an attack quickly, therefore minimizing the damage an insider can cause.

To understand the positive impact insider threat programs can have on organizations, it’s important to first look at the specific types of insider threat incidents they’re designed to stop.

Types of incidents that insider threat programs help address

Insider threat incidents take many forms. The reasons behind them may differ, but the damage they cause can be serious. According to the Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats by CERT National Insider Threat Center, the primary types of insider-driven cybersecurity incidents include:

• Intellectual property theft occurs when insiders exploit their access permissions to steal your organization’s trade secrets, proprietary data, source code, or strategic plans.
• IT sabotage involves deliberate damage to your organization’s systems, data, or networks caused by insiders in order to disrupt business operations or inflict financial damage. 
• Misuse of authorized access occurs when users perform actions that exceed their legitimate permissions. Access misuse can be motivated by malicious intent, but it may also be due to simple curiosity or convenience — and it can expose your organization to compliance and security risks.
• Unintentional incidents happen when negligent insiders compromise security without meaning to do so. Such incidents may result from emailing sensitive data to the wrong recipient, misconfiguring systems, or ignoring security procedures.
• Espionage occurs when insiders covertly collect and share sensitive or classified information with external actors or foreign governments.

A well-designed insider threat program can help your organization spot and stop all these types of incidents before they cause harm. In the next section, we outline 10 practical steps to help you design an effective insider threat program.

10 steps for building an effective insider threat program

Below, we list the ten phases of creating an insider threat program that you can follow to protect your company against insider threats and deter insider risks.

1. Get ready to build an insider threat program

Preparation is the key to success when building an insider threat program, saving you lots of time and effort. During this step, you’ll need to gather as much information as possible on existing trusted insider threat programs, cybersecurity measures, compliance requirements, and stakeholders, as well as define what results you want to achieve with the program.

2. Perform a risk assessment

Defining what assets you consider sensitive is the cornerstone of an insider threat program. These assets can be both physical and virtual, e.g., client and employee data, technology secrets, intellectual property, prototypes, etc. Performing an external or insider threat risk assessment is the ideal way to identify these assets and possible threats to them. This will enable you to take an accurate look at the state of your cybersecurity.

Usually, the risk assessment process includes these steps:

Once you’ve listed and assessed all risks, inform your organization’s upper management about the results. It’s also a good idea to make these results accessible to all employees, thereby increasing risk awareness within your company.

3. Estimate the resources needed to create the program

Developing an effective insider threat program is a comprehensive process that extends beyond just the cybersecurity department. To successfully implement this type of program, you’ll also need:

• Administrative resources — Support from various departments in your organization and their involvement in developing the insider threat program
• Technical resources — Deployment of dedicated cybersecurity software along with reconfiguration of existing solutions and infrastructure
• Financial resources — Money for purchasing cybersecurity software and hiring dedicated specialists

Before making technology investments, assess what technologies and tools are already in place and can be used for insider threat monitoring, for example, host- and network-based monitoring, data loss prevention, and SIEM.

“Ignition Guide to Building an Insider Threat Management Program”

by Gartner (subscription required)

Prepare a list of required resources so you can provide a precise estimate of the finances and employees you’ll need to implement your insider threat program.

4. Acquire the support of senior management

Use the information gathered during previous steps to get support from your key stakeholders for implementing the program. The list of key stakeholders usually includes the CEO, CFO, CISO, and CHRO. Their support is crucial for securing resources and promoting a culture that takes insider risk seriously.

To get their approval, you should prepare case studies that demonstrate the need for and benefits of implementing an insider threat program. You may also want to point out some data breach examples and their consequences, as well as the ways an insider threat program can help C-level officers achieve their business goals.

5. Create an insider threat response team

An insider threat response team is a group of employees in charge of all stages of insider threat management, from detection to remediation. Contrary to popular belief, this team should not consist entirely of IT specialists. It should be cross-departmental and have the authority and tools to act quickly and decisively.

When assembling your insider threat response team, make sure to determine (1) its mission; (2) the responsibilities of each team member; and (3) the policies, procedures, and software the team will use to combat insider threats.

To define roles and responsibilities, you may use the Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) matrix:

• Responsible: People who perform the task 
• Accountable: The person who is responsible for the result of the task 
• Consulted: People who provide input and participate in the decision-making process 
• Informed: People who need to be kept in the loop on progress and decisions

Note that formal responsibility for insider risk programs normally lies with the head of security/CISO (25%), IT security managers (24%), or the director of security (14%), according to the 2023 Insider Threat Report by Gurucul.

CISOs are primarily responsible for managing insider threat programs. With them in mind, we’ve come up with the CISO’s Practical Guide for Building an Insider Threat Program. This guide was written for Syteca by Jonathan Care, an expert in the field of cybersecurity and fraud detection.

6. Determine insider threat detection measures

Efficient detection of insider threats is only possible with dedicated software for insider threat management. This type of software helps you detect insider threats, allowing for a quick response and reducing remediation cost related to insider threats. 

For efficient insider threat monitoring and detection, choose software that can:

• Manage access to corporate resources according to users’ roles and job responsibilities. This allows you to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and critical systems.
• Monitor user activity and log user actions within your network. Monitoring data helps security officers review high-risk sessions in real time, investigate incidents, and assess the overall state of cybersecurity.
• Generate reports for investigation and audit purposes. Detailed reports let you analyze malicious activity and adapt your cybersecurity defenses to prevent incidents in the future. In addition, reports can help you during compliance audits by providing a comprehensive view of your IT infrastructure and activities within.

7. Form incident response strategies

Your response team must tackle common insider attack scenarios to act quickly upon detection of a real threat. Above all, an insider threat response plan must be realistic and easy to execute. Don’t try to cover every possible little scenario with a separate plan. Instead, create several core plans that cover the most probable incidents.

Your response plan for each scenario should include:

An effective incident response plan will help you:

• Get ready for emergencies
• Coordinate cybersecurity efforts when an incident occurs
• Resolve incidents promptly
• Reduce the damage caused by the incident

8. Plan incident investigation and remediation measures

To effectively manage insider threats, create procedures for investigating both cybersecurity incidents and possible remediation activities.

An investigation helps you get a clear picture of the incident’s scope and its possible consequences. Incident investigation usually includes the following activities:

• Collecting data on the incident (reviewing user sessions, interviewing witnesses, etc.)
• Assessing the damage caused by the incident
• Securing evidence for possible forensic activities
• Reporting the incident to superior officers and regulatory authorities as required

A detailed remediation plan should include communication strategies, reporting guidelines, and follow-up corrections to your cybersecurity measures in order to strengthen your defenses and prevent similar events in the future.

9. Educate your employees

The contents of any training courses you offer should depend on the security risks, tools, and approaches used in your organization. However, there are some common steps that every organization should take:

• Explain the reason for implementing an insider threat program; include examples of recent attacks and their consequences
• Describe common employee activities that may lead to data breaches and leaks, paying attention to both negligent and malicious actions, and including examples of social engineering attacks
• Inform your employees about whom they should contact first if they notice an insider threat indicator or need assistance with cybersecurity-related issues

The final stage of insider threat awareness training is measuring its effectiveness. To do this, you can interview employees, prepare tests, or simulate a targeted attack to see how your employees respond. This will reveal what your employees have learned and what you should pay attention to during future training sessions.

10. Review your program regularly

Creating an insider threat program isn’t a one-off process. Insider threats evolve and become more elaborate and dangerous over time. Therefore, you should review and update your program:

• At set intervals
• After an insider threat incident
• Whenever new compliance requirements are announced
• Upon changes to your insider threat response team

Note: This article briefly describes each step of developing an insider threat program. For more comprehensive information, please refer to our whitepaper.

How can Syteca help you implement an insider threat program?

Syteca is a cybersecurity platform that provides effective solutions to protect your organization against insider threats. 

With Syteca PAM, you can manage user access granularly. It allows you to configure access rights for each user and user role, identify unmanaged privileged accounts within your IT environment, manage corporate account credentials, verify user identities through multi-factor authentication, and manually approve access requests. With these controls in place, you can limit users to accessing only the specific data they need in order to do their jobs. Consequently, you can reduce the risk of opportunistic attacks and authorized access misuse.

Syteca User Activity Monitoring (UAM) allows you to watch user sessions live and as screen-capture recordings, accompanied by insightful metadata like used apps, visited websites, active windows, and typed keystrokes. You can leverage Syteca’s pre-configured and custom rule-based alerts on suspicious user activity to make sure you don’t miss any indicators of an insider threat. When Syteca alerts your security officers about a suspicious user action, it provides them with a link to a corresponding online session. Officers can then swiftly review suspicious activity to assess whether it has resulted in any damage or compromise.

Syteca also lets you respond immediately to threats by displaying warning messages, killing processes, and blocking users or USB devices until further investigation. Post-incident, Syteca can help you investigate the incident and analyze exactly how it happened by generating user activity reports and exporting encrypted user sessions in an immutable format for forensic investigation purposes.

Conclusion

The ten steps listed in this article can help you build an effective insider threat prevention and detection program. To successfully implement your program, you may need a dedicated cybersecurity solution. The Syteca platform allows you to detect early signs of insider threats and quickly address them. In addition, Syteca integrates seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure and is easy to scale as your organization grows.