The CrowdStrike Insider Incident Exposes the Next Security Gap: Post-Access Protection

The CrowdStrike Insider Incident Exposes the Next Security Gap: Post-Access Protection 

When a cybersecurity leader like CrowdStrike confirms a “suspicious insider” leaked internal dashboards, it reinforces what many CISOs are already signaling: the greatest vulnerability today isn’t the perimeter — it’s post-access behavior. 

McKinsey’s 2024 tech trends research shows digital trust and cybersecurity are now among the most adopted and fastest-growing investment areas, with tens of billions flowing into solutions that provide integrity, transparency, and confidence. Yet most of that spend is still focused on keeping attackers out, even as breaches increasingly come from the inside. IBM’s 2025 breach report found that “shadow AI” and unauthorized internal access contributed to breaches in 20% of organizations, dramatically increasing costs and exposure. 

In the Ponemon Institute’s 2025 report, organizations continue to be most concerned about a criminal or malicious insider, with 34% of respondents ranking it as their highest threat and have identified endpoints as the greatest risk in causing leaks. At the same time, organizations that are more frequently attacked have seen an increase in malicious insider attacks compared to other leak sources.  

Once an employee—or a compromised identity—is inside the system, controls like RBAC, ZTA, DLP, and endpoint protection become passive observers. Screenshots, shared dashboards, AI-modified images, and uploads move freely and invisibly across tools, devices, and the open web. This creates the exact blind spot attackers and malicious insiders rely on—a space where content moves freely, but security tools have no insight. 

The CrowdStrike incident makes one thing clear: Enterprises need protection that persists after access—durable, content-level signals that survive screenshots and transformations and give security teams visibility into who viewed, shared, or leaked sensitive material. This “post-access protection” layer is the emerging gap in the security stack, and it’s quickly becoming the frontier CISOs care most about. 

Digimarc has decades of experience, enabling banking, healthcare and other regulated industries close this gap. We do so by adding persistent, invisible protection that stays with content and detects misuse even after screenshots or when images, audio or video have been shared. If you’re re-evaluating insider-risk controls in light of this incident, we’re uniquely positioned to help, and we’d be glad to share what we’re seeing across the market. 

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Digimarc Leak Detection: Protect Your Business from Damaging Leaks of Sensitive Information