Catch Insider Risk Before Data Walks Out
Insider risk builds from negligent mistakes, malicious insiders, and departing employees, and agentic AI now moves that data faster than most teams can see. This playbook walks through a 14-step incident response checklist and the five principles behind a mature insider risk program.
What's inside
Why Insider Risk Happens: Three Root Causes
Most incidents are negligent: employees paste data into AI tools, email files home, or misconfigure sharing settings without realizing the exposure.
A smaller, higher-impact group of malicious insiders premeditate data theft for personal gain or a future employer.
Departing employees concentrate risk: data movement spikes in the 30 days before and after a resignation notice.
How Agentic AI Workflows Raise Insider Risk
AI agents act at machine speed across systems, so baseline behavioral patterns and normal anomaly detection stop applying.
Malicious instructions hidden in a document can direct an AI agent to exfiltrate or alter data without the user ever knowing.
A user can grant an agent access to send email or upload files, and the agent can route that data to the wrong destination.
A 14-Step Insider Risk Response Checklist
Each of the 14 steps in the checklist maps a specific investigative action to the exact Cyberhaven capability that supports it.
Data Lineage reconstructs the full trail, tracing every copy, rename, and transformation back to where the file originated.
The checklist closes with HR and legal handoffs, evidence preservation, and remediation of the posture gap that enabled the incident.