How Poor Offboarding Exposes Your Business to Insider Cyber Threats

When you think of a cyber-attack, what image comes to mind?

A hacker in a dark room? Perhaps a rogue nation-state launching a digital assault? These threats dominate headlines and rightly so. But there’s another, quieter risk sitting much closer to home: the insider threat.

And more often than not, they’re not wearing hoodies or cracking firewalls. They’re former employees, forgotten credentials, and outdated access policies; vulnerabilities created not out of malice, but neglect.

Why are insider threats harder to spot and more dangerous

In today’s fast-paced business environment, people change roles quickly. Key staff members move on, contracts end, and restructurings happen. But what many organisations fail to do is ensure that access to critical systems moves on with them.

When a senior systems administrator leaves, it’s not just a handover of responsibilities that’s required — it’s a digital clean-up. Without that, sensitive access points, privileged credentials, and control over critical infrastructure can remain open. Sometimes for weeks. Occasionally, for years.

One overlooked login can be all it takes.

A common scenario and an uncommon consequence

Imagine this: An IT engineer resigns. She had elevated access, ran backend processes, and managed core infrastructure scripts. Her replacement inherits the system, but not the knowledge. Documentation is minimal. Access control is loose.

Something breaks.

Worse, something is breached.

And the new hire, now sitting closest to the evidence, is the one under suspicion. Yet the real issue? Legacy access that was never revoked.

This isn’t just inefficient, it’s a ticking time bomb.

Four reasons insider threats remain overlooked

1. Turnover is now the norm, not the exception
   Staff movement is faster than ever, but security policies haven’t kept pace.
2. Poor offboarding processes
   Many companies fail to deprovision accounts, revoke keys, or change shared credentials when employees exit.
3. Spotty documentation
   Without clear operational logs or process handovers, knowledge disappears as employees walk out the door.
4. Operational pressure
   Teams are often too busy “keeping things running” to review who has access, or why.

So what can organisations do to protect themselves?

Coronation Merchant Bank’s cybersecurity specialists advise business leaders, particularly those overseeing complex, high-value operations, to treat access management as a strategic priority, not just an IT concern.

Five proactive measures to reduce insider risk

1. Enforce strict offboarding protocols
   Immediately revoke access for departing staff. No exceptions.
2. Implement continuous access audits
   Regularly review who has access to what systems, and ensure there’s a valid reason.
3. Document and transfer operational knowledge
   Create living documentation of scripts, schedules, and critical workflows. Institutional memory should outlive individual roles.
4. Use behavioral analytics and logging
   Rely on data, not assumptions. If a breach occurs, understand the who, what, and when through system logs and access trails.
5. Educate staff on unintentional threats
   Not every insider breach is malicious. Sometimes, it’s convenient to to email data to a personal account to “work from home”. Still risky. Still avoidable.

Why this matters now more than ever

As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, organisations are ramping up defences at the perimeter — firewalls, multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection. But too often, the internal doors remain wide open.

The rise in hybrid working, shadow IT, and contractor-based models only compounds this risk. In this evolving threat landscape, the most dangerous vulnerability might already be inside your network or worse, already gone.

Final thoughts

Insider threats don’t always come with bad intentions. Sometimes, they come with good intentions and bad habits. But whether malicious or accidental, the impact is the same.

Cybersecurity today isn’t just about preventing hackers from getting in. It’s about knowing exactly who’s still inside.

Ask yourself

When was the last time we audited our offboarding process?
If you don’t know, now’s the time to find out.

Because while you’re reading this, someone could still have access to your systems. And they shouldn’t.

This blog was written by Alex Okoli
Cybersecurity Engineer, Coronation Merchant Bank

Alex is a cybersecurity engineer focused on threat detection, access management, and implementing secure, resilient systems that align with business goals.

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