There are some conflicting figures as to which group is a bigger threat hackers or employees. Employees are still considered to the leading source of computer crime losses. Employees often have an easier time gaining access to systems or source code then ousiders or other means of creating computer crimes.
A word of caution is necessary: although the media has tended to portray the threat of cybercrime as existing almost exclusively from the outside, external to a company, reality paints a much different picture. Often the greatest risk of cybercrime comes from the inside, namely, criminal insiders. Information security professionals must be particularly sensitive to the phenomena of the criminal or dangerous insider, as these individuals usually operate under the radar, inside of the primarily outward/external facing security controls, thus significantly increasing the impact of their crimes while leaving few, if any, audit trails to follow and evidence for prosecution.
Some of the large scale crimes committed agains bank lately has shown that Internal Threats are the worst and they are more common that one would think. The definition of what a hacker is can vary greatly from one country to another but in some of the states in the USA a hacker is defined as Someone who is using resources in a way that is not authorized. A recent case in Ohio involved an internal employee who was spending most of his day on dating website looking for the love of his life. The employee was taken to court for hacking the company resources.
The following answers are incorrect:
hackers. Is incorrect because while hackers represent a very large problem and both the frequency of attacks and overall losses have grown hackers are considered to be a small segment of combined computer fraudsters.
industrial saboteurs. Is incorrect because industrial saboteurs tend to go after trade secrets. While the loss to the organization can be great, they still fall short when compared to the losses created by employees. Often it is an employee that was involved in industrial sabotage.
foreign intelligence officers. Is incorrect because the losses tend to be national secrets. You really can't put t cost on this and the number of frequency and occurances of this is less than that of employee related losses.
Reference(s) used for this question:
Hernandez CISSP, Steven (2012-12-21). Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP CBK, Third Edition ((ISC)2 Press) (Kindle Locations 22327-22331). Auerbach Publications. Kindle Edition.
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