Cost of Insider Incidents Surges 20% to Nearly $20m

Executive summary: The DTEX/Ponemon "Cost of Insider Risks 2026" report found insider incidents cost organizations an average of $19.5M last year, with employee negligence (including misuse of personal webmail, file sharing, and shadow AI) responsible for 53% of losses and outpacing malicious insider actions. The report warns that undocumented AI use and AI agents create invisible data-loss pathways, notes slow governance adoption for AI, and urges organizations to prioritize behavioral intelligence, identity-centric controls, defensive AI, data classification, and a shift to treating AI as an operational insider to reduce risk and detection times.