Over 50% of insider attacks involve exploiting elevation of privilege flaws.
A research study, based on data from January 2021 to April 2023, shows a rise in insider threats, with 55% relying on privilege escalation exploits and the remaining 45% introducing risks by downloading or misusing offensive tools. Rogue insiders typically turn against their employer when they have been given financial incentive to do so. It could also be out of spite, or due to differences with their managers. The average costs of such incidents is around $648,000 for malicious incidents and $485,000 for non-malicious incidents. It is also found that nearly half of insider incidents were unintentional mishaps, such as exploit testing getting out of control, executing offensive security tools without appropriate protection measures and downloading of unvetted code. Recommended approaches for managing insider threats includes timely vulnerability patching, user behaviour analysis to detect insider threat activity and security awareness training.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/how-malicious-insiders-use-known-vulnerabilities-against-organizations/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/privilege-elevation-exploits-used-in-over-50-percent-of-insider-attacks/
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast
https://505updates.com/2023-12-14-cybersecurity-and-open-source-headlines/