The Insider Threat - by Junaid Khalfay
Managing the Insider Threat
The threat within!
What is insider threat?
An insider threat is the potential for a person with access to an organization's assets, to use these assets in a way that could negatively affect the organization.
Introduction
Insider threats in cyber security are threats posed by individuals from within an organization, such as current or former employees, contractors and partners. These individuals have the potential to misuse access to networks and assets to wittingly or unwittingly disclose, modify and delete sensitive information.
Information at risk of being compromised could include details about an organization's security practices, customer and employee data, login credentials and sensitive financial records. The nature of insider threats means that traditional preventative security measures are often ineffective.
Traditional security measures tend to focus on external threats and are not always capable of identifying an internal threat emerging from inside an organization.
Types of insider threats include
· Malicious insider: Someone who maliciously and intentionally abuses legitimate credentials, typically to steal information for financial or personal incentives. They have an advantage over other attackers because they are familiar with the security policies and procedures of an organization, as well as its vulnerabilities.
· The Negligent: An innocent pawn who unknowingly exposes the system to outside threats. This is the most common type of insider threat, resulting from mistakes, such as leaving a device exposed or falling victim to a scam.
· The Accidental: The Accidental insider threat can be equally risky to the organization and is unfortunately quite common, accounting for 25% of data breaches in 2017. These are employees, vendors and partners with the best of intentions, but may accidentally click a link, forgo company policy, or accidentally leak information outside the organization.
Who exposed most data in the organization?
A research report published, 48% of the existing employees are likely to expose/compromise enterprise data.
Top 4 insider threat actors
Cyber security Insiders surveyed security professionals to identify the riskiest types of insiders. Here are the types of users most of them consider the most dangerous:
1. Privileged users and administrators — these users are particularly threatening since they hold all the keys to the organization’s infrastructure and sensitive data. Because of their high level of access, harmful activity by privileged users is difficult to detect as they don’t break any cyber security rules when accessing sensitive resources.
2. Regular employees — Regular users are not so dangerous compared to privileged users, but they still can harm an organization. For instance, they can misuse corporate data, install unauthorized applications, send confidential emails to the wrong address, become a victim of a phishing attack, etc.
3. Third parties and temporary workers — Vendors, business partners, and temps may not follow cyber security rules and practices implemented in your organization or may violate them unknowingly. Also, hackers can breach a third-party vendor with a low level of security to get inside your protected perimeter.
4. Privileged business users and executives — C-level executives have access to the most confidential and sensitive information about an organization. This category of users may abuse their knowledge for insider trading, personal gain, or corporate or government infiltration.
Why is The Insider Threat such a Big Deal?
Insiders have direct access to data and IT systems, which means they can cause the most damage. According to a 2015 Intel Security study, insider threat actors were responsible for 43% of attacks, split evenly between malicious and unintentional actors. According to the IBM X-Force 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index, insider cyber security threats are an even bigger problem. From 2015 to 2016, the percentage of attacks carried out by all insiders grew from 55% to 60% according to the study. Of those, about 73.6% were carried out by malicious insiders — or 44.5% of total attacks.
Over 50% of the total attacks in 2020 have been from an insider
Insider threat mitigation is difficult because the actors are trusted agents, who often have legitimate access to company data. As most legacy tools have failed us, many cyber security experts agree that it is time to move on.
Losses to enterprises due to insider attacks
The three main issues faced by organizations due to insider attacks are:
1. Operational disruption
2. Loss of critical data and IP
3. Damage to the Brand
Increase in the insider incidents in enterprises
Percentage of companies facing malicious threats is continuously increasing. From 25% in 2016 to over 50% in 2020 are facing issues with insider threats.
A lot of cyber security companies develop their strategies around preventing external threats. However, sometimes the worst attacks come from within.
Mitigating the insider risk
Having see the criticality of the insider risk and the potential damage it can cause to the organization, its important to then focus on what security professionals needs to do to address this problem.
The 6 critical areas to focus on, to manage the insider risk better, are:
Iraje PAM Solution helps to
1. Manage
2. Monitor
3. Control
4. Discover
5. Comply and
6. Secure
Your enterprise privileged accounts better.
Iraje PAM provides these critical capabilities to help manage the enterprise risk around the privileged users.
Summary
Insider threat is for real. It is not only dangerous but also very damaging to enterprises. The data shows that the insider threat has acquired serious proportions for enterprises to address this problem immediately and have solution in place to mitigate the insider threat.
Iraje PAM offers comprehensive solution to the insider threat by offering critical capabilities that ensure the risk of privileged accounts is managed better. For more information, reach us at [email protected].