Best Practices to Prevent Insider Threat
According to insider threat statistics, 34% of organizations around the world experience an insider attack each year. best practices to prevent insider threat That is not all, two-third (66%) of all organization considers malicious insiders more dangerous as compared to external threats. What’s even more alarming is the fact that the number of insider threats have increased by 47% in the last couple of years. To make matters worse, 70% of insider threat incidents were not even reported externally.
All these statistics clearly indicate how dangerous insider attacks can actually be. The sad part is that despite this very few businesses take steps to minimize the risk of insider threat. As a result, they fall prey to malicious insiders. These malicious insiders steal your data without getting noticed and try to run away with it. So, how can businesses thwart malicious insiders? That is exactly the question we will answer in this article.
In this article, AntiDos will teach you about seven effective ways to foil the plans of malicious insiders.
Here are seven ways you can use to keep malicious insiders at bay.
1. Define Your Insider Risk
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to define your organization’s insider risk. To do that, you need to understand different types of insider threats. There are two major types of insider threat. In the first type of insider attack, a foreign threat actor might lure your employee with a lucrative reward while the second type of insider threat involves an employee who has left your company but still has access to your critical business data.
Most businesses struggled to distinguish between the two types and could not tell whether the attack was intentional or by mistake. As a result, they could not protect themselves from these malicious insiders. Once you have clearly defined your organization’s insider risk and are aware of threat actors and their intentions only then, you can take concrete steps to block such attempts. Without a clear understanding of the type and intention, it is almost impossible to track the insider attackers involved.
2. Develop Specialized Skill Set
Identifying insider threats is not easy as it requires a specialized skill set. If you don’t have the best behavior analytics skills and an eye for detecting malicious acts, you will be hard pressed to detect malicious insiders. Since these cybersecurity attacks involve people you are working with, this could make the task even harder. Imagine how you would feel when you come to know that the person sitting next to you is involved in an insider attack.
Cybersecurity experts and researchers suggest that businesses should create a separate team that deals with insider threats instead of assigning that task to the security and operations center. This team should report to HR and legal teams and devise a method to respond to such attempts from employees.
3. Let Security Team Take Charge
I am not saying that you should keep your security team out of it. In fact, you should let them lead the investigation. This allows the business to take the case forward only when they have enough concrete evidence. You don’t want to take forward a half baked case and fire an employee based on that.
Let security analysts analyze things and ask questions such as why is an employee leaving the organization? What is the past track record of the employee? What information do I have about the user? Answering these questions is important to know more about malicious insiders.
4. Create Strong Bond With Other Business Units
Another mistake businesses make is that they give the sole responsibility of managing the insider threat to the IT or security team. This is the wrong way to deal with malicious insiders. Instead, your main focus should be on developing stronger relationships with law enforcement agencies, human resource and legal departments. This will help you get them involved in case of an insider threat. They will help you devise a plan of action and assist you in delivering a fitting response.
5. Improve Employee Onboarding Experience
Most insider threats take place because employees know that they don’t have insider risk protection in place. You need to give them a message that you have policies and guidelines to protect company data. You need to create an employee onboarding experience that educates new employees about all these things. Yes, you should make it easy for new employees to settle into your organization setup as it would be alien for them. Ensure that they know about and follow company user policies about handling company’s sensitive data. Tell them how they will be penalized if they breach any of these policies or found involved in malicious activities.
6. Harness The Power of Cloud Technologies
Apart from many other advantages, cloud technologies can also help you reduce the risk of insider threat. For instance, cloud based document management solutions such as Google’s G suite let you control and see who is accessing your documents and what edits they are making on it. This not only improves collaboration but also gives you more control. The more visibility and control you have over your data, the easier it will be to detect suspicious activities by malicious insiders. Cloud based solutions also let you restrict access and ability to download and view content, which is an added bonus.
7. Identify The Vulnerabilities
Conduct a comprehensive security audit of your organization to identify which areas are more vulnerable. Which employees are at a higher risk or pose a threat to your organization? Once you know where loopholes are, the next step would be to patch these holes so they can not be used by malicious insiders to their advantage. Keep a close eye on system, network and database administrators as they have the highest privileged access and are more likely to cause the biggest harm to your organization.
Which tactics do you use to block insider threats? Share it with us in the comments section below.
