How to Prevent Insider Threats with Endpoint Privilege Management
Security teams often focus on external threats, such as sophisticated phishing campaigns or zero-day exploits from unknown adversaries. But what about the dangers within your own organization? Insider attacks, carried out by individuals with legitimate access to your critical business systems, can be just as, if not more, devastating than an external attack.
A major weakness exploited in both malicious and unintentional insider incidents often comes down to users having too many privileges on their devices. That's why Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) is essential for insider threat protection and is key to a solid security strategy. Here, we'll dive into how BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management helps you combat insider threats, secure critical systems, and simplify compliance.
Why Insider Threats Pose One of the Biggest Cybersecurity Risks
Before we explore the nuances of EPM, let’s quickly break down the different types of insider threats and how to spot them. They generally fall into two broad categories:
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Unintentional insider threats: These are usually due to simple human errors. Examples of insider threats of this nature include an employee accidentally clicking on a phishing link that installs malware, or a developer inadvertently leaving a server exposed through misconfiguration.
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Malicious insider threats: These are deliberate acts like sabotage or data theft. This could be a disgruntled employee leveraging their access to steal sensitive data or a departing contractor disrupting critical operations.
How Endpoint Privilege Management Provides Insider Threat Protection
Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM), also referred to as Privilege Elevation and Delegation Management (PEDM), is one of the most effective security controls for mitigating insider threats. It helps you put the principle of least privilege into practice by giving users—on Windows, Mac and Linux—just the permissions they absolutely need for their specific tasks, and nothing extra. By intelligently limiting privileges at the endpoint, you can:
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Significantly reduce the attack surface: By limiting user privileges and eliminating standing administrative accounts, you remove the primary target for attackers and malware.
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Prevent unauthorized actions: Users without admin rights are blocked from installing unapproved software, changing critical system configurations, or running malicious scripts.
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Limit the blast radius: If an employee is compromised, the lack of local admin rights prevents malware from spreading from that endpoint to other parts of your network, minimizing the potential damage an insider can inflict, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Read more on our blog.
Customer Case Study
Large State Entity: Large State Entity Adopts Identity Security Insights to Reveal Data Across Domains and Reduce Risk
Latest Available Versions:
Endpoint Privilege Management (Cloud and Pathfinder) 25.6 - July 2025
Endpoint Privilege Management for Windows 25.4.270 - July 2025
Endpoint Management for Mac 25.4.2 - July 2025
Beekeepers Hot Topics
EPM install issue in Autopilot build since July 2025 Windows patches
“Has anyone seen the following issue we have been experiencing?
Autopilot pre-provisioning has problems in the final stages if the EPM agent is installed during the Hybrid build and the OS level is Windows 11 23H2 July 2025.
The Avecto driver (PGDriver.sys) seems to be clashing with the Autopilot final OOBE stage preventing the device from finishing on the correct Windows logon screen...”
Click here for the most popular discussions in BeeKeepers
Upcoming and In Case You Missed It Webinars:
Road Maps:
Upcoming Product Road Map EPM, Windows and Mac : Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025
2025 July Product Road Map: Endpoint Privilege Management Windows & Mac
User Groups:
Endpoint Privilege Management User Group Registration - Thursday, September 18th, 2025
Q2 EPM Virtual User Group Recording
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