Mitigating Insider Threats: Plan Your Actions in Advance

An insider attack is like an illness: prevention is better than a cure. Like illnesses, insiders can conceal their malicious actions, causing a lot of harm before they are detected.

Planning a risk mitigation process helps you reduce the potential damage of insider threats by putting a stop to them early on. In this article, we discuss why mitigating insider threats is essential, how to go about it, and how Syteca can help you.

What is insider threat mitigation?

Insider threat mitigation, or risk mitigation, refers to strategies employed to identify, prevent, and manage risks posed by individuals within your organization who have authorized access to your systems and data. These insiders could be any current or former employees, contractors, or partners with the ability to compromise your security, intentionally or otherwise.

[Risk mitigation is] Prioritizing, evaluating, and implementing the appropriate risk-reducing controls/countermeasures recommended from the risk management process.

NIST SP 800-30

The primary goal of insider threat mitigation is to minimize potential damage through a combination of various policies and technologies.

Why is mitigating insider threats crucial?

An insider threat mitigation program helps organizations detect and prevent insider threats that can lead to severe consequences, such as customer loss, reputational damage, and penalties for non-compliance with cybersecurity laws, regulations, and standards.

Acknowledging and managing insider threats proactively allows organizations to avoid — or at least greatly reduce — any potential damage caused by malicious insiders’ actions.

Therefore, preparing a risk mitigation plan is a must. You can develop this plan separately or include it as a part of your insider threat program. Let’s break down the four key components of a foolproof insider threat mitigation strategy.

Four components of an efficient insider threat mitigation strategy

Mitigation measures are usually laid out in an insider risk mitigation plan — a document that maps out the actions your organization should take to reduce the impact of insider-related incidents.

An insider risk mitigation plan usually includes:

To prepare a comprehensive insider threat mitigation plan, we recommend following these procedures:

1. Outline the key steps of the mitigation process

These steps usually include evaluating insider risks, prioritizing them, and implementing mitigation controls. (In the next section, you’ll find our key recommended steps for mitigating insider risks.)

2. Formalize high-level mitigation strategies

There are five fundamental risk mitigation strategies: acceptance, avoidance, transfer, control, and monitoring. When developing a risk mitigation plan, pick one of these strategies for each risk that your organization faces based on the risk’s probability and severity.

3. Describe risk-reducing controls

You can implement controls such as new organizational activities, cybersecurity policies and software, and changes to existing procedures. An insider risk mitigation plan should fully describe these controls, the results you expect to get from them, and the employees responsible for their implementation and supervision.

4. Specify the frequency of mitigation measures

Document the frequency with which mitigation measures must be carried out. This ensures your plan is kept up-to-date regarding new and emerging threats and risks your organization may face. Make sure your plan specifies when and which mitigation steps to repeat, as well as which strategies and controls to review.

4 main steps to mitigating insider risks

Before planning mitigation actions, make sure your organization conducts an insider threat risk assessment. The results of this assessment will help you identify:

• Possible risks, their impact, and the likelihood of each
• Insider threats your organization may experience
• Vulnerabilities that may be exploited by malicious actors
• Sensitive resources that may be endangered by malicious insider activity

Once you’ve discovered and assessed possible insider threats and risks, you can start planning mitigation actions.

Insider threat mitigation includes the following steps:

Step 1. Evaluate risks

Insider risk evaluation involves assessing the severity of a risk based on its probability and possible impact.

There are different ways to evaluate insider risks. The most common one is to create a probability/impact matrix. In this matrix, the horizontal axis shows an estimate of the impact of a risk on your organization from trivial to extreme. The vertical axis represents the probability of a risk occurring, from rare to very likely.

Step 2. Prioritize risks

With your risk evaluation results in hand, you can proceed to the next mitigation step — insider risk prioritization. Prioritizing helps you to:

• Determine which risks to address first
• Choose a mitigation strategy for each risk
• Select the most effective reduction controls for each risk

You can prioritize insider risks by analyzing their probability and severity, the history of insider incidents in your organization, and the specifics of your industry.

Step 3. Implement relevant controls

The last step of the mitigation process is choosing and implementing suitable controls to eliminate or minimize all insider risks. These controls may include:

• Insider threat mitigation tools, techniques, and policies
• Insider threat awareness training for employees
• Improvements to data protection

Step 4. Review and improve the risk mitigation process

Remember that even after you’ve chosen and implemented insider threat mitigation controls, the planning is never really over. New insider risks and threats will emerge as your organization grows and changes. Periodically review your risk mitigation plan and controls to ensure they remain effective. 

In the next section, we examine the security measures and solutions that are most commonly used in the mitigation process.

5 best approaches to mitigating insider threats

The set of measures and tools you use for mitigating insider threats may differ depending on the strategies you choose. However, there are some common security practices and solutions that fit most mitigation scenarios. Let’s take a look at these controls and how you can implement them with Syteca.

1. Create a cybersecurity-oriented corporate culture

Negligent employees and contractors are the main sources of insider threats. According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Report, negligent employees and contractors were responsible for 55% of insider threat incidents in 2024.

Employees and contractors usually make mistakes due to a lack of attention, poor knowledge of cybersecurity policies, or a desire to save time by circumventing security rules. Creating a cybersecurity-oriented corporate culture can help you reduce these risks.

Fostering such a culture requires implementing the following strategies:

• Educate employees about common security threats
• Show employees the possible consequences of internal and external attacks
• Make sure employees are aware of the consequences of neglecting cybersecurity rules

Employees with a high level of insider risk awareness will be more accepting of new security tools and practices. Making employees a part of your cybersecurity defense strategy can help you reduce insider risks in your organization.

2. Engage the HR department to detect insider threats

Malicious activity typically has behavioral and technical indicators. You can detect and monitor suspicious behavior inside your infrastructure with cybersecurity tools. However, you’ll also need to enlist the help of the HR department to spot risky behavior outside the digital environment. This may include cases of harassment, regular violations of corporate policies and culture, interest in matters outside regular responsibilities, etc.

There are several ways for HR to assist you in detecting and preventing malicious insider activity:

• Conduct extensive background screenings when hiring new employees
• Report cases of harassment and risky behavior to security officers
• Communicate with employees to determine the reasons for risky behavior and help them  rectify it
• Notify security officers of employee status changes like promotions and terminations so they can modify user access rights accordingly

3. Protect access to sensitive resources

Managing user access is one of the cornerstones of an insider threat mitigation strategy. The more access rights users have, the more damage they can inflict if they decide to go rogue, so you want to limit users’ access to sensitive resources as much as possible. However, employees must be able to interact with all the resources they need in their work routine, according to the principle of least privilege.

One way to address this challenge is by implementing a granular role-based access control system, where a user’s access rights depend on their role in the organization. With a role-based access control system, employees should be able to access only the resources they need for their work tasks. Consequently, your cybersecurity measures will reduce the possible attack surface without disrupting employees’ workflows.

Syteca is a comprehensive cybersecurity platform designed to protect your organization’s inside perimeter. Syteca Privileged Access Management (PAM) helps you secure access to sensitive resources, enabling you to:

• Detect and onboard unmanaged privileged accounts
• Granularly grant access to critical endpoints
• Manually approve or deny access to sensitive resources
• Implement the just-in-time approach by providing time-based access
• Securely manage user credentials

4. Monitor user activity

User activity monitoring (UAM) can help you keep an eye on the sources of insider risks — the users within your IT environment. Some monitoring tools allow you to view user sessions online to assess suspicious activity or review records later to analyze security incidents and determine the root causes.

Syteca UAM allows your organization to get full visibility into how users interact with your sensitive data and critical systems. With Syteca, you can:

• Record on-screen user activity in a video-like format
• Capture insightful and searchable metadata on user activity, including typed keystrokes, opened apps, visited URLs, etc.
• Generate customizable reports on user activity
• Monitor and manage USB device connections

5. Enhance incident response

It’s essential to respond to cybersecurity incidents as fast as possible. The more time malicious actors have, the more damage they can inflict.

Responding quickly is challenging, as insiders have legitimate access and their malicious actions can be difficult to distinguish from everyday activity. That’s why the average time to detect and remediate an insider attack is 81 days, according to the 2025 Cost of Insider Risks Report by Ponemon Institute.

To respond to a threat fast, you need to stay alert to potential security incidents. Deploying a dedicated software solution and using a MITRE ATT&CK model for mitigation can help.

Syteca’s incident response capabilities enable you to:

• Receive real-time alerts on suspicious user activity
• Use alert rules to automate incident response actions such as blocking users and killing suspicious processes

When you receive an alert, you can also review the associated user session online and block it if needed, preventing an insider attack from progressing.

Conclusion

Insider threat mitigation in cybersecurity is an essential process that enables your organization to prevent security incidents and reduce damage.

In this article, we’ve shown you how to plan an insider threat detection and mitigation process and effective security controls you can implement. As a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, Syteca offers PAM, UAM, and incident response solutions for detecting and mitigating insider threats in their early stages, preventing lasting damage to your organization.