Insider threats are among the most dangerous cyber risks. Yet, organizations of all sizes often seem reluctant or negligent in addressing them. Even companies with insider risk management programs may have limited cybersecurity budgets for mitigating these risks. More than simply simply having a program is required to protect your corporate data from today's sophisticated attacks.
This article will shed light on the types of insider threats you must detect and mitigate, the damage they can cause, the user attributes that increase these risks, and the security controls you should implement to prevent and defend against them.
Understanding Insider Threats
An insider threat is an employee or contractor who knowingly or unknowingly uses their authorized access to harm your business. There are three types of insider threats companies might encounter:
Negligent Insider: A careless or negligent employee or contractor who unwittingly allows a hacker to access your business’s network.
Criminal Insider: A malicious insider who abuses their privileged access to steal or exfiltrate sensitive data for financial gain or revenge.
Credential Theft: A thief who poses as an employee or contractor to gain access to sensitive data and then uses it illegally for financial gain.
The Serious Damage Insider Threats Can Cause
Even a single security breach caused by an insider threat can seriously damage your business in the following ways:
Theft of Sensitive Data: Valuable data, such as customer information or trade secrets, could be exposed following a breach. For example, a leading hospitality service provider experienced a data breach that compromised sensitive data, including credit card information and other confidential details about guests and employees.
Induced Downtime: The downtime following a breach impacts your business in multiple ways. It can take a long time to ascertain the details of a breach and control the damage, draining your business resources. For instance, a company was forced to shut down permanently after a disgruntled employee deleted thousands of documents from its Dropbox account.
Destruction of Property: A malicious insider could damage physical or digital equipment, systems, applications, or information assets. A former employee of a leading tech company gained unauthorized access to its cloud infrastructure and deleted hundreds of virtual machines, jeopardizing access for thousands of users. The company had to spend significantly to fix the damage and compensate affected users.
Damage to Reputation: This is a guaranteed consequence of a security breach. Investors, partners, and clients may lose confidence in your business’s ability to protect personal information, trade secrets, or other sensitive data.
User Attributes That Aggravate Insider Threats
The likelihood of a security breach caused by an insider can significantly increase due to:
Unnecessary access is provided to users who don’t need it to perform their responsibilities.
Haphazard allocation of rights to install or delete hardware, software, and users.
Usage of weak login credentials and inadequate password hygiene practices.
Users act as a single point of failure due to a lack of access control (common with CEO fraud).
Build a Resilient Defense Against Insider Threats
As a business, you can implement several security measures to build a resilient defense against insider threats as part of a proactive rather than a reactive strategy. Some immediate measures you can implement include:
Assess and Audit All Systems: Direct your IT team to assess and audit every system, data asset, and user to identify insider threats and document them thoroughly for further action.
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