2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report

The first Cost of Insider Threats: Global study was conducted in 2016 and focused exclusively on companies in North America. Since then, the research has expanded to include organizations in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific with a global headcount of 500 to more than 75,000. In this year’s study, we interviewed 1,004 IT and IT security practitioners in 278 organizations that experienced one or more material events caused by an insider. A total of 6,803 insider incidents are represented in this research.

According to the findings, 56% of incidents experienced by organizations represented in this research were due to negligence, and the average annual cost to remediate the incident was $6.6 million.

Research also showed that the cost of an insider threat varies significantly based on the type of incident. This is largely due to the type of activities required following an insider threat incident, including monitoring & surveillance, investigation, escalation, incident response, containment, ex-post analysis and remediation.