Human risk: why your biggest security risk has a company ID badge

But what if the real risk is already inside your organization?

The $17.4 million price of ignoring human behavior

Organizations are well prepared to stop brute force attacks, phishing attempts, or malware infections. What they are far less prepared for is the moment when a trusted employee becomes the entry point.

This doesn’t always happen because of negligence or malice. Increasingly, it happens because of private behavior - actions employees take on corporate devices that make them vulnerable to coercion or blackmail.

Unlike external breaches, these incidents don’t set off alarms. Access patterns look normal. Credentials are valid. Yet the risk is enormous: once an employee feels compromised, the attacker doesn’t need to hack your systems. They already have the access they need.

The attack that triggers zero security alerts

Here’s the problem: traditional security tools are built to detect anomalies. They raise alerts when logins happen at unusual hours, when unauthorized access is attempted, or when malware signatures are found.

But they don’t detect behaviors that create leverage for attackers. If an employee uses a corporate device to access illegal or compromising content, no unusual login occurs. No SIEM event is triggered. From the system’s perspective, everything looks fine.

From the attacker’s perspective, it’s the perfect recruitment scenario.

From data loss to 2% global turnover fines: this is the real cost of insider risk

When an insider is compromised, the fallout doesn’t stop at data loss.

• Regulatory exposure: Under NIS2, organizations face fines of up to 2% of global turnover if they fail to demonstrate effective insider threat controls.
• Operational disruption: Compromised insiders can disable controls, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate sensitive data without detection.
• Reputation and trust: According to Verizon’s DBIR 2025, 60% of cybersecurity incidents involve the human element — and stakeholders increasingly expect organizations to address this proactively. This isn’t just an IT problem. It’s an enterprise-wide risk.

Closing the gap

Cybersecurity leaders increasingly recognize that the human layer is the last blind spot in mature security frameworks. Addressing it requires detection that is:

• Precise – focusing only on confirmed, high-risk behaviors.
• Privacy-aligned – protecting employees’ rights while safeguarding the organization.
• Actionable – integrating directly into SOC workflows without overwhelming teams with noise.

The takeaway

External attackers will always be a threat. But the bigger danger may be the trusted employee who, knowingly or not, becomes vulnerable to exploitation.

To build truly resilient cybersecurity, organizations must widen their view: it’s not just about keeping intruders out. It’s about recognizing when risk is already inside the firewall.

Want to explore this in more depth? Download our whitepaper The Big Gap in Cybersecurity to learn how organizations are closing the insider risk detection gap.