Know Your Worker (KYW): The Intersection of Worker Risk and IAM

After more than 10,000 years of human existence in an analog environment, we must all adjust to a digital world where we are prone to myriad fraud and theft schemes perpetuated by AI-savvy hackers, thieves, and adversarial nation-states. It is a different world, and enterprises will need to adjust to this new world order.

Humans today don’t typically have the cyber literacy to fend off complex influence operations and social engineering attacks that put the organizations’ information, brand, and reputation at great risk. The workers themselves are essentially the last bastion of protection an organization has. According to Verizon’s 2023 Breach Investigation Report released in March 2024, such human worker failures account for 75% of all data breaches and ransomware attacks today, either by human negligence or malfeasance. Protecting against these insider threats starts with KYW as we’ll describe in this report. This concept is an extension of the now widely supported Know Your Customer (KYC) standards, which are the processes by which banks obtain information about the identity of their customers.

In this report, TechVision Research identifies the overall worker risk management objectives in concert with existing process and technology infrastructure. We also highlight critical risk mitigation techniques and controls that can prevent the inadvertent enablement of an “insider” to cause significant damage to your organization. These insights will help establish a Know Your Worker philosophy so that people are put in positions to succeed while limiting the “blast radius” from a human-induced mistake or nefarious action. We then conclude this review with a set of pragmatic recommendations and an enterprise action plan