REPORT

Insider Threat Pulse Report 2025: Trends from 100 Security Leaders

See what other security teams are doing to detect escalating insider threats and get practical takeaways to close gaps in your own program

Key takeaways:

56% of organizations experienced an insider threat incident in the past year
Security teams are equally concerned about negligent and malicious insiders
Alert fatigue, tooling gaps, and manual workflows delay detection and response
60% of HR–security coordination is still manual, leaving exposure gaps

Over half of enterprises experienced an insider threat incident in the past year – and it’s not just disgruntled employees that are creating problems. Negligent clicks on phishing links, shadow IT, and fraudulent job applicants (yes, including North Korean IT operatives) are shining a light on risky holes in enterprise security programs.

The threat isn’t hypothetical – it’s happening at scale, right now. SpyCloud’s 2025 Insider Threat Pulse Report, based on input from 100 security leaders, shows how alert fatigue, manual HR-security coordination, and fragmented toolstacks are leaving teams flying blind. The overall takeaway? Traditional approaches and behavioral analytics alone won’t save you.

Identity misuse is the common thread behind both negligent and malicious insiders, and why security teams need to move from reactive to predictive – fast.

Download the full report to see hard data from your peers on what’s working (and what’s not), and learn how forward-thinking orgs are flipping the script to stop insiders earlier in the attack lifecycle.

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FAQs

What are the top insider threats in 2025?

Over half of enterprises experienced an insider threat incident in the past year, and the threat landscape has evolved far beyond the traditional “disgruntled employee” narrative. Identity misuse is the common thread behind both negligent and malicious insiders, making this a critical risk that organizations can no longer afford to ignore. The top insider threats in 2025 include negligent insiders, compromised insiders, and malicious insiders such as the DPRK IT workers participating in the North Korean IT worker scheme.

How are security teams reducing insider threat risk in 2025?

Forward-thinking security teams in 2025 are abandoning reactive, behavioral-analytics-only approaches and embracing preventative, identity-centric security strategies.

The most successful organizations are integrating dark web intelligence with AI insights and automated remediation workflows, enabling them to detect compromised credentials and suspicious identity patterns in seconds to stop insider threats before they create incidents – which take an average of 81 days for organizations to resolve.

By leveraging AI that’s built on investigative tradecraft to process and contextualize massive amounts of exposure data, investigators can more rapidly and accurately correlate and attribute exposed identity data to a malicious, negligent, or unwitting insider threat with signals that teams can then act on.

Why are insider threats harder to detect than external attacks?

Insider threats are fundamentally harder to detect than external attacks because of the inherent trust and access that insiders possess within an organization. Malicious insiders are especially dangerous and difficult to stop for two reasons. First, the perpetrator may have extensive knowledge of an organization’s security policies, business processes, and response strategies. Additionally, an insider can often circumvent cybersecurity measures and directly access the network.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that identity misuse is the common thread behind both negligent and malicious insiders, yet traditional security tools are designed to spot anomalous behavior from the outside, not legitimate users acting within their normal access patterns. When someone already has authorized access to systems and understands the security infrastructure, they can operate under the radar of conventional detection methods. This is why traditional approaches and behavioral analytics alone won’t save you – organizations need to shift toward identity-centric security that can correlate dark web exposure patterns to identify potential insider risks before they escalate into full-scale attacks.

Where does the data behind SpyCloud’s Insider Threat Pulse Report come from?

SpyCloud’s 2025 Insider Threat Pulse Report is based on input from 100 security leaders, including CISOs and senior security professionals, at companies across a variety of industries with more than 500 employees.