Insider Threat Statistics for 2025: Key Facts, Types of Incidents, and Costs

Understanding the current landscape of insider threats in cybersecurity is essential for any organization aiming to strengthen its security posture. As the nature of internal risks evolves, tracking the latest trends empowers security leaders to make smarter, more proactive decisions.

In this article, we break down the latest research, share expert insights, and highlight real-world incidents to help you assess your organization’s vulnerabilities and refine your insider threat management strategy.

Key takeaways:

• The cost and frequency of insider-driven security incidents continue to rise.
• Negligence remains the leading cause of insider incidents. 
• Security teams face mounting challenges in managing insider risks due to complex IT environments, rapid adoption of new technologies, and inconsistent security controls.
• Today’s sophisticated technological solutions are a cornerstone of insider threat prevention.

Research on insider threat statistics

To provide you with the most relevant information and facts, we’ve referenced the most credible insider risk reports:

These insider risk research reports provide key insights into insider threat trends, techniques and methods employed by threat actors, and remediation costs.

Top 3 insider threat actors and incidents

The 2024 Insider Threat Report by Cybersecurity Insiders states that 71% of organizations are at least moderately vulnerable to insider threats. 51% of organizations reported experiencing six or more attacks in 2023.

Companies continue to face insider threats traceable to these three types of actors:

Privileged users

In January 2024, Mercedes-Benz discovered a serious security oversight. Researchers at RedHunt Labs found out that the company’s GitHub token with unrestricted and unmonitored internal access was published publicly online. The token exposed source code, cloud credentials, and sensitive infrastructure data, including SSO passwords and system blueprints.

A Mercedes spokesperson confirmed that the internal source code was published on a public GitHub repository. The incident was attributed to human error.

Regular employees

Regular employees have limited capabilities compared to privileged users, but they can still cause harm to your organization. For instance, they might inadvertently misuse corporate data, install unauthorized applications, send confidential emails to the wrong address, or become the victim of a social engineering attack. 

But not all employees endanger your organization by accident. Malicious employees act with intent, often for financial gain, retaliation, or ideological reasons. 

An example of an insider attack driven by regular employees:

In May 2025, Coinbase, an American cryptocurrency exchange platform, informed its customers that cyber attackers had bribed a group of Coinbase support agents to access customer data. Utilizing their legitimate access privileges, agents exfiltrated customer data and provided it to the attackers.

Later, the attackers contacted Coinbase and demanded a $20 million ransom to prevent the public release of the data. The perpetrators also impersonated Coinbase representatives in social engineering campaigns, successfully manipulating Coinbase customers into sending them cryptocurrency. Coinbase announced it would fully reimburse the victims of this attack.

Third parties

Third parties are vendors, subcontractors, business partners, and supply chain entities that have access to your IT systems or data. Third parties may fail to follow your organization’s cybersecurity rules or violate them with malicious actions. Additionally, hackers can target a poorly secured third-party vendor to infiltrate your protected perimeter.

An example of a third-party insider risk incident:

In May 2025, Adidas disclosed a data breach stemming from a cyberattack on a third-party customer service provider. The breach compromised contact details of customers who had interacted with Adidas’s support team. Breached data included verified emails, phone numbers, and shipping addresses. 

Adidas launched an investigation and notified impacted users. Though the attackers didn’t publicly release any sensitive data at the time, they could potentially exploit leaked data in future social engineering or phishing campaigns.

These are just a few out of many real-life examples of cyber attacks that underscore the varied and damaging nature of insider threats, whether caused by human error, malicious intent, or third-party negligence.

Cost and frequency of insider threat incidents by risk profile

The 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute analyzes how often insider-driven incidents occur and how much they cost. For classification, the report uses three risk profiles: insider negligence, malicious intent, and credential theft by external parties.

Insider negligence

Insider negligence is the cause of most insider security risk incidents, emphasizing the need for user activity monitoring. In total, the report analyzed 4,321 such incidents, with the average organization experiencing 13.5 events in 2024. 

The total annual cost has climbed to $8.8 million, up from $7.2 million in 2023. Likewise, the average cost per incident has increased to $676,517, a significant jump from $505,113 in 2023.

Malicious intent

Insiders with malicious intent are harder to detect than external attackers or hackers, as they are familiar with your organization’s cybersecurity measures and sensitive data. According to the report, there were 1,995 such incidents in 2024, with each affected organization experiencing an average of 6.3 events.

The cost per malicious insider incident reached $715,366 in 2025, up from $701,500 in 2023, making them the most expensive types of insider threats on a per-incident basis. However, the total annual cost has dropped to $3.7 million, down from $4.8 million the previous year.

Credential theft

Credential theft is one of the most common methods external attackers use to penetrate an organization’s protected perimeter. Using legitimate credentials, malicious actors can operate undetected within a system for long periods of time. To obtain user logins and passwords, perpetrators use social engineering, brute force attacks, credential stuffing, and other attack vectors.

The Ponemon report provides information on 1,552 such incidents, with each organization facing an average of 4.8 annually. The average cost per incident has surged to $779,797, up from $679,621 in 2023, making it the highest among all three insider threat categories. The total annual cost has also increased to $4.8 million.

Common insider attack vectors

Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report outlines two common insider threat vectors:

Miscellaneous errors

Miscellaneous errors are committed unintentionally by internal actors, according to the Verizon report. The main insider groups responsible for such errors are divided into privileged users (developers and system administrators) and other end users. Their top errors are:

Privilege misuse

Privilege misuse means utilizing privileged access inappropriately. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report says that 89% of all privilege misuse cases are financially motivated.

The most common type of privilege misuse is privilege abuse. It accounts for the majority of all privilege misuse cases and refers to the use of privileged access rights for carrying out fraudulent or malicious actions.

Factors contributing to the complexity of detecting and preventing insider threats

According to the 2024 Insider Threat Report by Cybersecurity Insiders, the three most common factors that make the timely detection of insider-driven attacks particularly difficult for cybersecurity teams are as follows:

Insider threats are becoming more frequent

The percentage of insider threats is still rising. The 2024 Insider Threat Report by Cybersecurity Insiders shows that 48% of organizations reported an increase in the frequency of insider threat incidents. Additionally, more than half of the organizations faced six or more insider attacks during 2024.

We’re now going to look at how the increase in frequency of insider threat data breaches has impacted the time and cost of response and remediation.

The cost of insider threats continues to rise

Quantifying the impact of security breaches and insider attacks is challenging, since there are different types of damage, and the outcomes of attacks may be non-linear and convoluted. The total cost of an insider threat incident includes the direct cost of the data breach, indirect costs, and lost opportunity costs.

These costs keep rising each year.

According to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute, the total average cost of insider threat incidents increased by over 109% between 2018 and 2024.

Companies in North America suffer the most from insider attacks and their consequences; the average cost in this region increased from $11.1 million to $22.2 million within just six years.

The average total spending on a single insider threat incident caused by negligence also went up by 39.5% between 2022 and 2024.

To prevent the devastating consequences of these trends, organizations need to detect threats posed by employees in a timely manner — but that’s not as easy as it seems.

Detecting and preventing insider attacks takes time

The longer an insider incident goes undetected, the more severe the consequences. Some breaches may go undetected for months or even years.

Detecting the actions of malicious insiders is challenging, as they know exactly where sensitive data is stored and which cybersecurity measures are in place. Spotting negligent insiders is also tricky, as it involves tracking the actions of all users in your organization.

It takes 81 days on average to detect and contain an insider threat incident, according to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute. Only 12% of insider-related incidents are contained in less than 31 days.

The 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute also shows that the longer it takes an organization to respond to a security incident, the higher the associated costs. The average yearly cost of insider threat incidents that took over 91 days to detect was $18.7 million in 2024.

In the next section, we’ll explore some effective strategies you can use to mitigate insider threats.

What is the best strategy for protecting against insider threats?

The increase in insider risks necessitates the use of advanced procedural and technological insider threat protection measures. According to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute, 81% of organizations have already implemented or are planning to implement an insider threat program.

With so many cybersecurity tools on the market, it’s hard to narrow them down to one particular line of defense and choose the insider threat management software that delivers the best result with the minimum amount of effort.

Data loss prevention [PDF], user training and awareness, privileged access management (PAM), employee monitoring and surveillance, and security and event management (SIEM) are the top five tools and methods organizations employ to manage insider risks, according to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Global Report by Ponemon Institute.

How Syteca helps you detect and prevent insider threats

Syteca is a cybersecurity platform that addresses the issues covered in this article by helping  you efficiently prevent, detect, and respond to insider threats within your organization:

• Privileged access management (PAM) capabilities allow you to secure and granularly control access for all users in your organization. To help you prevent insider threats, Syteca PAM offers two-factor authentication (2FA), privileged account discovery, workforce password management, access approval workflows, and time-based access restrictions.
• User activity monitoring (UAM) capabilities let you monitor and record user activity across all of your organization’s endpoints, empowering you to increase visibility, detect insider threats, and gather cybersecurity evidence. Syteca UAM supports monitoring on the widest list of platforms on the market, including Windows, Linux/Unix, macOS, X Window, Wayland, and others.
• The incident detection and response module provides real-time alerts that allow your security officers to quickly detect and respond to insider threats. You can also configure the system to respond to threats automatically.

Syteca also offers robust reporting, investigation, and data anonymization capabilities to help you comply with the requirements of the major cybersecurity laws, standards, and regulations in your area and industry. Syteca offers multiple deployment options and integrates seamlessly with your existing infrastructure.

Turning insights into action

In this article, we’ve reviewed the most comprehensive insider threat reports to bring you recent, relevant data, along with insights on how your organization can strengthen cybersecurity to prevent insider attacks.

To stay ahead of threats, organizations must adopt a comprehensive, integrated approach to insider risk management. Solutions like Syteca empower security teams with control over access, visibility within the environment, and the ability to act quickly when insider threats are detected.