Your insider threat program likely has a blind spot
Traditional insider threat tools excel at what they’re designed for: detecting suspicious behavior once a malicious insider is operating inside your network. But they’re not built to catch hidden threats that bypass detection entirely. Here’s what traditional insider threat tools generally don’t see:
- The North Korean operative applying for a privileged role under a stolen and synthetic identities
- The engineering director whose infected personal laptop is exposing your code repository credentials on the darknet
- The ERP vendor whose password reuse just handed ransomware operators initial access to a targeted attack
Traditional insider threat tools excel at what they’re designed for: detecting suspicious behavior once a malicious insider is operating inside your network. But they’re not built to catch hidden threats that bypass detection entirely. Here’s what traditional insider
The uncomfortable truth? Criminals have discovered new entry points that put your current programs at risk in ways that happen long before a disgruntled employee starts slow-dripping company data to their personal device.
According to our recent Insider Threat Pulse survey, 56% of organizations experienced insider threat incidents last year despite many having formal programs in place. One security leader captured the challenge perfectly:
While SIEM, DLP, and UEBA solutions excel at behavioral detection and workflows once someone’s operating inside your network, they can’t see threats that start in the criminal underground, where stolen identity data creates the conditions for insider attacks well before behavioral anomalies surface.
Which is where SpyCloud comes in.
SpyCloud Investigations flips the insider threat visibility gap
The evolution of insider threats requires a fundamental shift in defenses. Instead of waiting for suspicious behavior, what if you could detect identity compromise before it becomes network access?
SpyCloud provides visibility into both negligent and malicious insiders before anomalous behaviors even surface, bridging the gap between traditional detection and proactive threat prevention. The reason this works? All forms of insider threats can be tied back to some form of identity misuse.
At SpyCloud, we focus on recapturing stolen identity data from the hands of criminals – over 850+ billion stolen assets from malware infections, third-party breaches, and phishing campaigns – to identify risks before they mature into incidents.
Our Investigations solution reveals hidden insider threats by offering a holistic view of the digital footprint of employees, contractors, and job candidates. Enhanced with AI Insights built on decades of investigative tradecraft, SpyCloud Investigations automatically connects exposed assets – emails, usernames, passwords, and more – uncovering 8× more identity records than exact match queries for visibility into forms of identity misuse that reveals negligent, malicious, or fraudulent insiders.
Traditional insider threat detection vs. SpyCloud approach
This isn’t about replacing your existing tools – it’s about giving your insider threat program an extra lens with intelligence from the criminal underground that your other tools would never see.
So, let’s walk through two real-world scenarios that demonstrate how SpyCloud Investigations with AI Insights transforms insider threat detection.
Scenario 1: Employment fraud & stopping malicious insiders
SpyCloud continuously monitors your workforce for signs of insider threats, but the most effective defense starts before threats enter your organization. Here’s an example of how you can use SpyCloud Investigations to prevent employment fraud with proactive screening.
The task: Your talent acquisition team has identified a promising candidate for a senior engineering role who would be granted privileged access upon hiring. Before extending an offer, they’ve asked your security team to go beyond basic background checks and investigate for any signs of risk.
The problem: Typical background checks only reveal public records, credit history, and basic employment verification. How do you detect potential signs of unauthorized access that could lead to identity misuse, especially when threat actors like North Korean IT workers use fraudulent identities created to bypass traditional tools?
Detecting malicious insider threat signals with SpyCloud Investigations and AI Insights
STEP
01
Initial email query
Starting with the candidate’s email, SpyCloud Investigations immediately reveals concerning patterns, with dozens of exposed identity assets – more than you imagined. The applicant was infected with infostealer malware – which is common for the average person, including DPRK-affiliated IT workers who inadvertently compromise their own devices.
STEP
02
Pattern analysis visualization
Using SpyCloud Investigations’s search and pivot capabilities, you notice more warning signs within the exposed data tied to the candidate:
- VPN access: Multiple malware logs originating from Astrill VPN IP addresses, a service frequently used by cybercriminals workers abroad
- Excessive job platform activity: Filtering exposure data by the target domains revealing excessive engagement with Western job platforms (Upwork, Greenhouse, LinkedIn), well beyond what is expected for a normal application
- Remote access tools: You see multiple exposed credentials for multiple remote access tools like AnyDesk or TeamViewer, suggesting some nefarious attempt at taking over remote access
STEP
03
Identity patterns
IDLink analytics reveals multiple email addresses associated with the candidate, and maps password reuse patterns across these multiple personas and job sites, revealing suspicious commonalities between supposedly different individuals, all different from the candidate themselves.
Loading the Investigations interactive graph immediately exposes the problem: this isn’t one person’s digital identity. It’s fragments of multiple stolen identities, carefully stitched together to create a convincing fake or synthetic persona.
STEP
04
Finished intelligence
With one click, AI Insights analyzes the exposure data connected to the candidate and generates a comprehensive pre-hiring report, which would normally require hours of senior investigator analysis, revealing:
- Identities hiding in plain sight: Multiple linked personas using credential variations across job platforms (Upwork, Greenhouse, LinkedIn), suggesting coordinated identity fraud
- Connected relationship webs: Shared VPN infrastructure and remote access tools linked between different online personas, along with more common password patterns
- Digital behavioral patterns: Excessive job-seeking activity inconsistent with their claimed employment history and location, plus malware infection paths typical of DPRK threat actors
- Categorized digital activity: Browser behavior from infected devices showing cryptocurrency exchanges, VPN services, and multiple freelance platforms – all red flags for your candidate
AI Insights automatically correlates these signals and generates finished intelligence that clearly categorizes identity impersonation patterns, unblocking your additional steps to provide definitive proof of employment fraud.
The result: SpyCloud transforms a previously-impossible investigation into immediate, actionable insights. Your security team gets an AI-generated report to facilitate follow-up conversations and next steps with HR, complete with the methodologies and infrastructure involved, to help stop a potential malicious insider from gaining access to your systems.
This malicious insider was detected using the same intelligence criminals use to build fake identities, turning their own tools and online actions against them. SpyCloud Investigations also helps to validate the identity of a recently onboarded employee at any point, always leaning on evidence of compromise. Traditional insider threat programs and DLP / UEBA would have waited for suspicious employee behavior or data exfiltration to happen, but SpyCloud helps detect these hidden threats earlier.
Employment fraud is just one source of insider threats. Far more common are legitimate employees whose exposed credentials are already circulating in the hands of criminals, making them unwitting insiders. Here’s another example where SpyCloud Investigations identifies these negligent threats.
Scenario 2: The unwitting or negligent insider threat
The alert: SpyCloud notifies you that data pertaining to Lucas Vega, a CloudOps director with privileged access to your cloud services, was very recently exposed on the dark web. SpyCloud’s recaptured data shows Lucas’s personal device was infected with LummaC2 infostealer malware, exposing corporate applications including your hosted identity provider (orbitivelabs.okta.com) and other SaaS-development sites.
The problem: Traditional insider threat tools see nothing suspicious – Lucas shows no behavioral anomalies, no unusual network activity, and no policy violations. Yet his corporate access is circulating in criminal marketplaces, waiting to be exploited.
Lucas was using a personal device with EDR and antivirus installed, yet multiple corporate applications were compromised. Your SOC team faces a critical question: What’s the full scope of this compromise? You know which apps are provisioned within the IDP, but everything else is a mystery.
Without knowing the complete extent of Lucas’s exposed identity, how do you determine which systems need immediate remediation?
Shutting down a negligent insider threat with SpyCloud Investigations and AI Insights
STEP
01
Automated identity correlation
Starting with Lucas’s corporate email address, you launch a search within SpyCloud Investigations that automatically expands beyond the initial indicator. SpyCloud pivots across related identity fields in the background, making connections automatically with IDLink analytics and revealing the full scope of compromise. SpyCloud surfaces all exposed assets that are connected to Lucas’s digital identity, and in this case, the broader set of access hidden on the personal device.
STEP
02
Visual analysis
Within seconds, you see a context-rich identity graph that reveals the full extent of Lucas’s digital footprint:
- Multiple “Lucas”-based email addresses spanning personal and professional use
- Dozens of reused password variations containing "Orbit" phrases
- An infected device that exposed credential re-use across social media sites and corporate applications
The picture becomes clear: Lucas maintained decent operational security practices, but password variations shared between compromised personal sites and corporate accounts have created pathways of opportunity for criminals.
SpyCloud Investigations with AI Insights can then take the findings a step further, delivering intelligence that would take senior investigators hours to piece together. AI Insights automatically detects behavioral patterns and digital habits across the exposed data that signal potential indicators of an insider threat. This tradecraft-built analysis turns raw identity exposures into finished intelligence, in seconds, accelerating the path to preventing threats.
STEP
03
AI-generated identity report
SpyCloud then analyzes all connected exposures for Lucas and generates a comprehensive report for you, highlighting:
- 40+ corporate applications requiring immediate credential resets
- A risk timeline showing when exposures occurred and information about the infection
- Pattern recognition of password reuse linking Lucas’s holistic digital identity
The result: What would have taken your team hours of investigation across multiple tools is condensed into minutes of actionable intelligence. You now have clear evidence that this isn’t malicious intent – its identity compromise requiring immediate remediation.
This was exposed access sitting in the criminal underground, but nothing that traditional UEBA would have caught because your employee was triggering no behavioral red flags, no anomalies, and no signals to your IAM, and nothing significant to cause forensics to look at the IT systems. It was a negligent threat waiting to be exploited.
As a next step, you can escalate the list of 40+ applications that need to be remediated, in accordance with your organization’s best practices, to your IR and Identity team using SpyCloud’s enriched data that can be directly integrated with your SIEM, SOAR, IdP and more.
These scenarios illustrate two common forms of insider threats that traditional programs miss. From sophisticated employment fraud to negligent employee compromise, SpyCloud reveals threats by accounting how criminals use stolen identity data.
Detect the insider you’d never suspect with SpyCloud
“SpyCloud Investigations with AI Insights gives us the confidence to act. What might previously have felt like a hunch around a potential insider threat is now supported by clear threat signals and detailed analysis.”
– Jacques Chitarra, Senior Director of Global Security & Privacy at Samsonite
SpyCloud Investigations is built to find hidden identity connections and correlate fragmented data from the criminal underground to surface answers for analysts. With IDLink analytics and AI Insights, we’re making the tradecraft and thought process of a veteran investigator accessible to analysts of every experience level to close the loop between detection and action.
SpyCloud integrates identity data into your existing workflows, giving your team’s focus and the signals to reduce noise while increasing your ability to catch definitive threats. Whether they’re malicious, compromised, or operating under stolen identities, SpyCloud reveals the insider threats hiding in plain sight.
Don’t wait for the next headline about insider data theft or fraudulent contractors. SpyCloud Investigations with AI Insights can transform your insider threat program from reactive to proactive.
Fortify your insider threat program with SpyCloud.
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