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In the world of work, record numbers of workers quit their jobs amid the Great Resignation (albeit not quite to the heights initially reported). Bubbling below the surface, this posed a cybersecurity risk in the form of insider threats. The cause of this was the offboarding process.
The erratic nature of offboarding, disrupted by the pandemic and the high numbers of employees electing to leave their employment around the same time, evolved into a topic of concern for IT leaders.
An insider threat is the threat that a direct employee or a contractor has to use his or her authorized access, wittingly or unwittingly, to do harm to an organization’s mission, resources, personnel, facilities, information, equipment, networks, or systems.
Drawing the two events together, the high numbers of resignations carried the potential to pose a mix of malicious and accidental insider threats. Examples included the deliberate, like data theft from disgruntled employees, and fraud as a result of privileged access; to the more accidental, like privacy abuses and leaking of sensitive data. This was elucidated by Forrester principal analyst Heidi…
