Insider fraud and trust controls: what do security teams do now?

TL;DR: Insider attacks cost an average of $17.4 million in 2024, and Sumsub’s podcast argues the real challenge is balancing fraud controls, internal trust, and culture without weakening operations. The lesson for IAM and security teams is that governance has to cover people, process, and privileged access together, not as separate problems.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Sumsub: Insider Fraud: The Enemy Within

By the numbers:

• In 2024, the average cost of an insider attack was 17.4 million dollars.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams reduce insider fraud without undermining employee trust?

A: Use trust as a design principle, not as a control substitute.

Q: Why do insider threats become so expensive when privileged access is broad?

A: Broad privileged access lets a trusted user reach many systems, change records, approve actions, or disable controls from one account.

Q: How do IAM and fraud teams know when insider risk is moving from theory to loss?

A: They should look for unusual access combined with business-impacting activity, such as late-night approvals, entitlement changes, or unexpected exports of sensitive data.

Practitioner guidance

• Segment privileged actions by business impact Separate read, approve, export, and admin capabilities so one insider cannot move from routine work to high-loss activity without additional checks.
• Add friction to sensitive workflows Require step-up approval, dual control, or secondary review for actions that can move money, expose data, or disable monitoring.
• Review insider-risk signals with IAM and fraud teams together Correlate access logs, abnormal transaction patterns, entitlement changes, and off-hours activity in a shared process.

What's in the full article

Sumsub's full podcast covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The discussion between Thomas Taraniuk and Marc Evans on how insider fraud investigations unfold in practice.
• The trust and culture trade-offs that shape real-world fraud prevention programmes.
• The reporting context around the stated 2024 insider-attack cost figure.
• The podcast framing for balancing internal trust with security controls in employee-facing environments.

👉 Read Sumsub's podcast on insider fraud and trust controls →

Insider fraud and trust controls: what do security teams do now?

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