September 2, 2025
What is Insider Threat?
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Nation-State Insider Threat Intelligence
Protect Your Strategic Advantage
When Trusted Insiders Work for Competing Nations, the Risk Multiplies
Nation-state actors recruit, coerce, or plant insiders to access sensitive data, bypass defenses, and operate undetected for months or years. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re part of a growing strategy by foreign governments to infiltrate, exploit, and outpace their competitors.
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Average Cost of an Insider Threat Incident
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Months Spent Resolving an Insider Incident
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Increase in Investigations Tied to Nation-State in 2024
The Bottom Line
When nation-state insiders compromise intellectual property or sensitive systems, the impact is immediate. Financial fallout, operational disruption, and reputational damage can stall innovation and delay mission-critical programs. Preventing insider threats means understanding what’s at stake before the breach occurs.
The Cost: Nation-state insider incidents result in multimillion-dollar losses from IP theft, legal action, and market setbacks.
Loss of Trust: Breach events erode confidence among partners, regulators, and stakeholders—damaging long-term relationships and future opportunities.
Time to Rebuild: Recovery from insider compromise can span months or years, requiring major investments in personnel review, system hardening, and program restart.
Is Nation-State Risk a Blind Spot in Your Organization?
Reveal vulnerabilities in your insider risk program—especially where nation-state threats are most likely to exploit them. Take the Insider Threat Readiness Assessment.
Insider Threat Prevention
How Nation-States Infiltrate Your Organization
Nation-state actors aren’t just targeting governments. Commercial, research, and enterprise sectors are now on the front lines. The first step toward protecting your IP and economic advantage is identifying the insider risks hidden in your workforce, partnerships, and codebase.
Employees, researchers, and contractors often have trusted access to sensitive programs—making them prime targets for foreign recruitment or coercion. Economic pressures, layoffs, and internal dissatisfaction only amplify the risk. In complex contractor environments or where staff move frequently between roles, identifying long-term behavioral anomalies becomes increasingly difficult.
Your third-party landscape is fertile ground for nation-state manipulation. Global partnerships, joint ventures, or opaque investment sources can mask foreign influence or adversarial ownership. M&A activity can introduce inherited risk—especially when due diligence doesn’t account for state-sponsored affiliations.
The software supply chain is a growing vector for insider compromise. Open-source contributions from unknown developers and third-party integrations may conceal ties to nation-state entities. As you onboard vendors or acquire companies, you may also be inheriting hidden software vulnerabilities tied to foreign actors.
Strider Case Study
IP Theft Prevented at a Fortune 100 Manufacturer
A Fortune 100 chemical company discovered its core technology was being targeted by the PRC. Strider identified the threat actor, revealed the exposure, and enabled a company-wide response that protected their innovation.
Read how Insights helped prevent the theft of a flagship product, and sparked a shift to proactive security.
Insider Threat Prevention