According to the recent X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2020, more than 8.5 billion records were exposed due to breaches in 2019, of which 86 percent were due to misconfigured assets. These issues affected only half of the records breached in 2018, and as the 2017 report stated, 70 percent of the 2.9 billion records lost that year were due to misconfigurations.
These statistics paint a picture of what inadvertent insider threats can look like. While we may imagine inadvertent insiders as careless people clicking on dodgy emails, this image needs to be updated to include a wider variety of poor security hygiene behaviors. Arguably, the greater source of security incidents in our environments is people creating cloud servers that are set with dangerously unrestricted permissions.
