You might find it hard to sleep at night if you think a pesky mosquito is lurking somewhere in the corner of your bedroom preparing to pounce and drain you of a few drops of blood. How much harder would it be to get a good night’s sleep wondering if a spy or a hacker is prowling about your company’s network to steal juicy morsels of sensitive information? And what if that spy or hacker were a current or former employee?
What are Insider Threats?
As the name implies, an insider threat is a security risk that comes from within the targeted organization or company. The bad actor doesn’t necessarily have to be an employee. They could be former employees, contractors, board members, consultants, business partners, or a stranger who has garnered the login credentials of an employee. Threats from insiders can be nefarious or unintentional, depending on their intentions. Unintentional insider threats can be caused by a negligent employee
responding to a phishing attack. Malicious threats, on the other hand, can be deliberate data theft, data destruction, or corporate espionage for personal gain or to benefit another organization.
Regardless of the level of threat, anyone with access to proprietary data and insider knowledge can pose a malicious threat. Insiders account for 25% of all security incidents. According to a recent report by ProofPoint, 69% of companies have experienced various types of insider threats and corruption such as data breach, theft of trade secrets, intellectual property, or customer data in the past year.
Who Can Be an Insider?
The term “insider” refers to anyone within your organization’s network. Most establishments understand this to mean that an insider is an employee, but insider threats are more than just employees. An insider can be any third party with authorized network and data access. The list of insiders who can access sensitive data might include suppliers, clients, and business associates or partners. Companies often create network accounts for consultants and contractors performing work for the organization. Members of the corporate board may have broad, legitimate access to privileged accounts as well as valuable information. Perhaps most pernicious insider threat incidents are the ones carried out by former employees whose accounts have not been promptly removed by the system administrators—particularly if an employee left under less than amicable terms.
Data Leaks Caused by Insider Threats: 4 Ways to Protect Yourself
Security policies, practices, and technologies can help mitigate privilege misuse or limit the damage caused by insider threats. You can minimize the risk of
data leaks by following these best practices and taking required security measures to prevent insider attacks.
1. Monitor User Behavior
Monitoring user behavior in real-time is the most effective technique. Detecting abnormal behavior associated with malicious and suspicious activity, data theft, or exploitation is the most effective method of combating the insider threat. Identifying when user behavior starts to become abnormal is the key to detecting insider threats and taking corrective action.
2. Security Policy
As a minimum, a comprehensive security policy should outline the prevention of security threats. Your security policy outlines procedures for preventing and detecting insider threats. Include guidelines on how to investigate insider misuse in your policy. The policy should clearly define the consequences of insider misconduct. The threat of the company’s quick and strict response to insider misuse will dissuade many employees from succumbing to temptation.
3. Vet Newly Hired Employees
Performing background checks may be considered prohibitively expensive or cumbersome by some companies. A background check costs only between $50 and $200, however, and will save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Advanced systems exist to verify the complete profile of a person. Standard background checks may fail to reveal if a new employee lives with a scammer or an ex-employee with the wrong attitude. Consider using a service like NORA (Non-obvious Relationship Awareness) to determine to whom you give authorized access to sensitive business information and computer systems.
4. Implement Data Leak Detection and Prevention Technologies
Email is by far the most common pipeline for data leaks. Whether intentional or not, mountains of data leave your company every day through email. Powerful automated solutions exist that use such cutting edge technologies as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Machine Learning (ML) to focus on detecting and preventing data leaks through email. Such solutions employ three main techniques to detect and prevent insider threats.
Outbound Protection
Data leaks are often totally unintentional acts by negligent insiders who simply fall for an email scam and send sensitive or proprietary information to cybercriminals posing as trusted recipients. Data leaks also occur when cybercrooks intercept email traffic between your employees and legitimate correspondents. And true inside operatives take advantage of email to siphon critical data out of your organization.
It is essential, therefore, that your defenses against potential insider threats include effective protection of your outgoing email traffic.
Encryption is the proven solution to block interceptors from eavesdropping on your email traffic. To work well, however, encryption must be automatic so busy employees don’t sidestep this vital practice. In addition, encryption must run in both directions. Recipients must encrypt their replies. Otherwise, your carefully encrypted outbound mail becomes unencrypted clear text on the way back in—juicy targets for hackers and thieves.
Inbound Protection
While outbound protection is critical for keeping your data out of the hands of cybercriminals, inbound protection is equally important to keep your employees out of dastardly hackers’ hands. An effective inbound layer of protection can
spot malicious emails even before they hit your users’ inboxes. The hackers use AI/ML to aim their phishing attacks at vulnerable targets. Your protective solution must likewise use AI/ML and super-sensitive OCR to stay ahead of the attackers. Your system must scan every incoming email for potential threats, not just for known bad actor domains and addresses, but for telltale signs lurking in the email header, body, and file attachments. You don’t want any suspicious messages reaching your employees’ workstations until the emails have been vetted by your security teams.
Account Compromise Detection
Your outbound protection must also include awareness of unusual insider behavior. Internal spies or hackers who have gained access to unsuspecting employees’ accounts may send your sensitive data to addresses outside your normal network of correspondence. They may also send emails at odd hours or from unusual locations. Collecting user behavior analytics is an important part of insider threat defense. A system armed with AI/ML learns the typical usage patterns of every employee—what they communicate about, when and where they send messages and to whom. Any abnormal email behavior should instantly set off alarms.
Prioritize Insider Threat Prevention in Your Company
Insider attacks will continue to rise in organizations, regardless of whether those attacks come from a malicious source or happen unintentionally. You must play a proactive role in preventing them. You must be on a search-and-destroy mission every minute of every day to detect and resolve deliberate or inadvertent insider threats and outright attacks before they bleed your company dry.
How do you take a proactive approach and adopt a defense-in-depth strategy that will enable you to reduce the threat of insider attacks within your organization? Trustifi covers you on all fronts. Our next-gen email security solutions protect your data coming and going and keep your loyal employees out of harm’s way.
Inbound Shield – Trustifi’s powerful multi-layer scanning solution protects your organization from targeted threats. Phishing, ransomware, spam, insider threats, and unsolicited emails are all analyzed, detected, and categorized deeply with state-of-the-art AI/ML and OCR technologies.
Outbound Shield – You can rest at night knowing your emails are being sent securely and in accordance with data classification and data loss prevention rules established by your security team. Trustifi’s cloud-based SaaS solutions integrate in just minutes with industry-leading systems like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange on-premise systems, and Google Workspace.
Account Compromise Detection – Trustifi’s AI/ML engines derive insider threat indicators by monitoring the behavior of user emails to detect irregularities in variables such as volume, devices, the kind of emails sent, context, geo-location, and other factors, to identify if a user’s mailbox has been compromised. If intrusion is detected, the system alerts the user and the security team and seals off that account until the compromise has been neutralized.
To learn more about how Trustifi can protect your business and to see a free demo of our advanced insider threat detection solutions,
contact a Trustifi security advisor today. Protect your company and your current employees 24×7 without reducing productivity or increasing staff.
