Introduction
Insider threats remain one of the most damaging and difficult risks for any organization, and modern security now depends heavily on insider threat detection with SIEM to expose these issues early. A recent incident involving a former Intel employee shows how even advanced companies can be vulnerable when trusted users exploit legitimate access for the wrong reasons.
This is a clear example of why visibility, context, and behavioural analysis are now as critical as traditional perimeter defences.
A Look at the Intel Incident
The situation at Intel is a sharp reminder of how quickly a trusted employee can turn into a serious internal risk. According to legal filings, a long-time engineer who was notified of his termination during Intel’s 2024 layoffs managed to extract a massive amount of sensitive data — around 18,000 confidential files, including material classified as “Intel Top Secret.”
What makes this case especially concerning is how it unfolded. Intel’s systems initially detected and blocked the engineer’s attempt to move files from his work laptop onto an external drive about a week before he left the company. But instead of stopping there, he shifted strategies. Within days, he began transferring sensitive documents to a personal NAS device — a location completely outside Intel’s monitoring and control. Over several days, tens of thousands of files were exfiltrated, including proprietary software, source code, and internal project documentation.
When Intel later realized the scope of the breach, they attempted to contact him through multiple channels but received no response, eventually resorting to legal action to recover the data.
This isn’t the only time Intel has faced this type of issue. In a previous case, another departing employee copied confidential information and later used it while pursuing a job at a competing tech giant. Incidents like these highlight how even well-resourced companies can struggle when insiders misuse legitimate access.
The key challenge is simple: the user didn’t need to break in. No firewalls were bypassed. No vulnerabilities were exploited. Every step involved normal credentials and company-issued devices. When traditional security tools are designed to spot external attacks, a determined insider with valid access can move quietly under the radar.
This incident exposes a long-standing truth — without behavioural monitoring and real-time context, insider misuse blends into everyday activity until the damage is already done.
The Real Challenge: Legitimate Users With Malicious Intent
Insider threats succeed because they operate under the cloak of legitimate access. Everyday actions—opening files, running builds, copying data—don’t look suspicious in isolation. But when these actions scale drastically or occur during sensitive employment transitions, they become high-risk behaviours that traditional security controls often fail to distinguish.
Three factors collide in situations like this:
Access: The user is authorized and trusted.
Opportunity: The environment allows movement of large amounts of data.
Timing: Events such as offboarding or internal friction create vulnerability windows.
Without continuous monitoring and contextual analysis, these factors go unnoticed until after the damage is done.
Why Legacy Approaches Aren’t Enough
Relying solely on firewalls, authentication controls, and endpoint tooling creates blind spots. These measures are designed to differentiate between outsiders and insiders—not between normal employee behaviour and potentially harmful behaviour from the same person.
Key limitations include:
• Lack of behavioural baselines
• Limited correlation between HR events (e.g., termination) and technical activity
• Difficulty spotting sudden surges in data access
• Delayed detection due to manual review processes
Once a trusted employee begins acting outside their typical pattern, the response must be faster than manual investigation can reasonably achieve.
How Logstail Improves Insider Threat Detection with SIEM
Logstail is built for precisely these scenarios—where the biggest risk comes not from an external attacker but from an internal user who already has the keys.
By unifying logs, telemetry, authentication activity, access events, and user behaviour into one platform, Logstail strengthens insider threat detection with SIEM and provides the continuous visibility that traditional tools lack.
What Logstail brings to the table:
Behavioural Baselines
Logstail learns what normal activity looks like for each user, role, device, and service. When someone suddenly escalates their file access volume or alters long-standing patterns, the system highlights it immediately.
Contextual Intelligence
Risk increases during offboarding, team restructuring, or role changes. Logstail correlates these HR-linked events with technical activity to identify threat indicators that would otherwise look harmless.
Real-Time Detection
Unusual data transfers—large downloads, unexpected sync operations, access to restricted repositories, or movement toward external destinations—trigger alerts instantly.
Forensic-Ready Audit Trails
Every action, alert, and event is logged with precision. If an insider incident occurs, Logstail provides the evidence required for legal proceedings, internal investigation, and compliance reporting.
Staying Ahead With Logstail Academy
Catching insider threats isn’t just a tooling problem — it’s a knowledge problem. Security teams need the right visibility, but they also need to understand what they’re looking at. That’s why Logstail pairs operational monitoring with ongoing education through the Academy.
Academy builds on that by giving users the skills and background to interpret those signals with confidence. Whether someone is new to cybersecurity or already deep in the game, the Academy keeps them sharp with practical guidance, threat-focused lessons, and real-world examples. The more your team understands the mechanics behind insider threats, the better they can leverage Logstail’s insights.
- Logstail Platform handles the visibility.
- Logstail Academy strengthens the people using it.
For a more hands-on breakdown of how SIEM platforms surface insider-threat signals, check out Logstail’s Academy course: Insider Threats: Recognizing and Responding with SIEM .
It walks through practical detection logic, event patterns, and response workflows.
Building a Strong Insider Threat Detection with Logstail SIEM Strategy
Organizations aiming to prevent incidents like Intel’s must adopt a layered strategy that combines access controls with behavioural monitoring and contextual analytics.
Strong policies and technical safeguards are important, but without real-time visibility into how data is being used, critical signals remain buried.
Recommended practices include:
• Enhancing monitoring during employee transitions
• Restricting high-risk data pathways when roles change
• Mapping and classifying sensitive data assets
• Using analytics-driven platforms like Logstail to identify anomalies early
• Automating response workflows to reduce reaction time
Final Thoughts
The truth is simple: insider threats aren’t going away. The people who already have access to your systems will always be the hardest to evaluate, the hardest to monitor, and the fastest to cause damage when something shifts in their intent or circumstances. Modern security demands more than firewalls and policies; it demands awareness of how users actually behave.
That’s why staying aligned with a platform like Logstail matters. It keeps you in step with what’s happening across your environment in real time — the subtle anomalies, the odd access patterns, the quiet signals that usually slip past traditional defenses. With Logstail running as part of your security workflow, you’re not guessing, you’re not reacting late, and you’re not relying on blind trust. You’re operating with clarity.This incident highlights why insider threat detection with SIEM must evolve beyond perimeter controls.
If you want your team to stay ahead of the next insider incident instead of reading about it afterward, stay on track with Logstail. Visibility changes the outcome, and Logstail is built to give you exactly that.
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