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A CISO’s Guide to Rethinking Insider Risk

White Paper

A behavior-driven framework for detecting risk hidden in legitimate activity, from employees and service accounts to AI agents

Insider risk hides inside legitimate access, builds gradually over days and weeks, and now extends to AI agents that hold trusted credentials, so detecting it takes behavioral baselines instead of static rules.

Insider incidents now cost an average of $19.5 million to remediate, according to the Ponemon Cost of Insider Risks 2026 Report, and their number has more than doubled in recent years. AI agents with trusted credentials have joined the workforce, and static rules miss risk when every action looks allowed.

This white paper gives you a framework for a modern insider risk program. It explains how user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and Exabeam Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA) baseline people and AI agents, how HR, Legal, and business leaders share ownership, and which questions to ask vendors and your own team.

Key Questions This White Paper Helps You Answer

• Which insider types cause the most incidents, and how does risk enter through each one?
• How do you spot risky behavior when every individual action is technically allowed?
• Why do short correlation windows miss insider risk that builds over days, weeks, or months?
• How do AI agents create insider risk, and how do you baseline their behavior?
• What roles should HR, Legal, and business leadership play in your insider risk program?
• What should a multi-year insider risk plan include, and how do you prove its value to executives?

How Exabeam Extends Behavioral Analytics to AI Agents

Agent Behavior Analytics (ABA) applies the same behavioral model UEBA uses for people to AI agents. It ingests activity from platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and Claude Enterprise, baselines each agent’s normal behavior, and alerts your team with context the moment an agent drifts. Users, service accounts, machines, and agents all fall under one risk model.

Download the white paper to build an insider risk program that covers your entire workforce, human and digital.