18 May 2022
Key Measures To Prevent Insider Threats
Phew! I am happy and satisfied. My company is all safe, and my employees are the most cooperative and honest employees. What? Wait a minute. Do you really think this? What if someone from your company is leaking your company’s information to the other party. Insider threats come from someone residing in the company who […]
Phew! I am happy and satisfied. My company is all safe, and my employees are the most cooperative and honest employees.
What? Wait a minute.
Do you really think this? What if someone from your company is leaking your company’s information to the other party. Insider threats come from someone residing in the company who has all the information and data about the company and intends to harm the organization for some hidden motives. It involves the employees who either left the company or are still working in the company. Insider threats are difficult to identify and are more dangerous than outsider threats as the employees have access to all the information, networks and computers. Only a few Security companies in London can potentially handle these threats. There are three types of insider threats:
Malicious Insider
These kinds of insiders have the intention to harm the individual or the company as they hold grudges against ex-employee. They have the advantage as they are very familiar with the policies and procedures and their weaknesses.
Careless Insider
A careless or negligent insider is someone who mistakenly exposes things to threats. Their intention is not to harm anyone, but the company falls into danger with their negligence.
A Mole:
A mole is someone who is considered to be the outsider but has succeeded to gain insider access to a privileged network. It includes someone who pretends to be an employee or a partner.
Handling such threats is not easy. You have to be focused, vigilant and intelligent to control insider threats.
Insider Threats Warning Signs:
- Downloading and accessing data that are not employee use
- Working after hours
- Downloading large files and data on a USB
- Employees showing negative behavior
- Emailing sensitive information to a personal email account o
- Unsatisfied employees
- Resigning from the organization without any reason
Although it is difficult to control insider threats, with quick action you can minimize insider threats. Following are the steps which help organizations to prevent threats.
- Protect Critical Assets
Critical assets are of great importance because if they are destroyed or damaged, they will impact the privacy and truthfulness of the organization, leading to a negative impression. This asset includes both physical and logical, i.e. systems, technology, facilities, and people. Intellectual property is an essential aspect of critical holdings as it provides software copyrights, customer data for sellers, and schematics.
The organization must keep an eye on the data. Present technologies have the system to remove the sensitive information of the organization.
A thorough understanding of the assets is helpful to identify attackers who intend to target critical assets. The following questions will help you understand the critical issues.
– What kind of critical assets are present?
– Do we have enough knowledge of each critical asset?
– What is the importance of each critical asset, and can we describe why it is crucial to our organization?
– What is the list of critical assets that we priorities?
– Who has authorized access to those assets?
- Implement Policies
Understanding organizational policies and procedures will help reduce unintentional damage to the organization or going against the organization for a perceived injustice. Organizations should Implement policies clearly to prevent misunderstandings. Every individual in the organization should have explicit knowledge about the security procedures and understand their rights concerning intellectual property (IP), so they should know that they are not allowed to share privileged content they have created.
For this purpose, an organization should make sure to provide a copy of organizational policies as soon as an individual joins the organization so that they should know their duties as a consequence of any kind of violation. The organization should ensure that they read and sign the policies.
- Physical Security
Trusting employees leave the organization vulnerable and become prone to insider threats who try their best to hide illegal activities. An organization can detect, prevent, and respond to such threats effectively by taking immediate action. For this, organizations should keep track of every employee and their activities from multiple data sources. So that organization will be aware of what kind of things are happening inside the organization and ensure that their data and information are safe and secure. To prevent any malicious insider or imposter, the organization can use deception technology to trap them and keep an eye on their activities.
Organizations can detect user activity by using the SIEM solution. SIEM is a security information and event management solution. This system allows the organization to continuously observe employee actions. Furthermore, it will enable the detection of regular as well as unusual activity. For instance, if an employee’s record is sent to this system, it will be possible to identify unofficial usage of the account to see if the employee is present physically within the area while logged in a workstation locally. It will also help to access the movement of employees within the area and his after-hours physical access. Limited access to control
- Limited Access Control
The people who are controlling and accessing sensitive data should be kept limited. Make sure to give access control to someone who is a trust-able member of your organization. Track what kind of information is accessible to which member.
- Insider Threat Awareness:
Arrange training for all newly hired employees and contractors and make them aware of insider threats before giving them access to their systems. It will help them stop any illicit activity.
Thus if you see any suspicious activity happening inside your organization, take a look at it because sometimes your small actions, which might not be rude, can lead to damage. Encourage employees to immediately report any insider threat and train them to deal with these threats. Be good to your employees, listen to them, try to solve their issues and offer incentives so that they can work with honesty and sincerity.