Over several years, there have been several new types of cyberattacks discovered across different industries. Among them all, an insider threat is one of the most worrisome cyberattacks as it involves someone from within the organization, having the authorized access to business systems or networks.
It can be an employee, board member, business partner, consultant, or an ex-employee who could either intentionally or unintentionally pose a threat to your business operations. You need a thorough insider investigation service in order to find and mitigate such threats before any irreversible damage takes place.
Insider threat is an important attribute of cybersecurity that you must be aware of, and this article will help you with it. Read along till the end to learn what insider threats are, their types, and some real-world examples.
In simple words, an insider threat is a cyberattack that is often initiated by individuals working in your company. Employees or stakeholders having access to the company’s data or resources make use of it to harm the business’s reputation, equipment, systems, and networks.
An insider threat that goes undetected can lead to data corruption, resource degradation, system sabotage, corporate espionage, information disclosure, and even terrorism. Not just that, but by infiltrating your company systems through an insider threat, cyber criminals can also launch ransomware and malware attacks.
Therefore, it becomes more important than ever for you to avail yourself of insider threat investigation services, giving professionals the chance to identify and mitigate such risks beforehand.
Now, there are several types of insider threats that might lead your organization to face serious data loss or some irreversible security breaches, including:
As the name suggests, it is the type of insider threat that takes place when any of the company stakeholders decides to purposefully harm the organization. Various surveys have stated that intentional insider threats often come from people who are unhappy with the organization’s work culture, employee recognition policies, or appraisal schemes.
Now, an unintentional insider threat is also caused due to an employee or stakeholder of the company, but unknowingly. For instance, when an employee makes an error that leads to the compromise of critical business data, it is referred to as an unintentional insider threat. Similarly, clicking on malicious links, sending business data to the wrong email IDs, or opening phishing emails are a few of the unintentional human errors that lead to a data breach.
In this type of insider threat, the culprit is not often from within the company, but can be a business partner, investor, or contractor. Being negligent with data handling is the reason behind the rise of third-party insider threats.
A collusive insider threat is also referred to as a malicious insider! Such a type of threat indicates that one or more compromised individuals within the company are working with external partners to disrupt the business systems and operations. In most collusive threat cases, a cyber criminal hires an individual to be part of the organization and steal its intellectual property.
It is again a specific form of intentional insider threat, intending to trigger harm for the company, either for personal gain or vengeance. Such insider threats aim at leaking sensitive business data or blackmailing company directors. The individuals acting as malicious insider threats can also steal business data to advance in their careers.
To help you better relate to the fact that insider threats can be critically dangerous for an organization, here are some real-world examples for you to count on:
Juliana Barile, an unusual employee at an undisclosed credit union firm in New York, was fired back in 2021. She decided to take revenge and make the company pay for her grievance. As the IT company failed to deprovision Juliana’s access to the sensitive business systems post termination, Juliana took it to her advantage.
Within the next 40 minutes of termination, Juliana deleted more than 21GB of sensitive business data, including 20,000 files and 3,500 directories. Some of those files were also mortgage applications and anti-ransomware software. Not just that, but Juliana also had access to the board meeting discussions and other such sensitive information.
An innocent and errant employee, working at the City of Dallas, was fired after people discovered that his mistake led to the deletion of 22TB worth of data, collected between 2018 and 2021. Among all of those deleted files were 13TB of photos, case notes, and videos that belonged to the Police Department of Dallas.
An investigation was held, and it was revealed that this was no malicious attack, but a simple mistake of not following the strict internal procedures while transferring files. All evidence led to the employee’s mistake, and he was ultimately fired.
In order to prevent insider threats, you need to implement certain strategies within your business operations, which include:
You can turn to reputed firms offering insider investigation services in India, and let them detect potential threats within the organization. Experts involved in the process will be working in real-time to detect intentional, unintentional, or other types of insider threats.
Not just that, but they will also be offering employee monitoring solutions to keep a tab on the activities of every individual working in the company.
You can implement the UEBA tool for leveraging AI & ML to launch insider threat monitoring. This tool will monitor the users’ activities across the corporate network and will report any suspicious behavior. Beyond that, this tool will also help you conduct an internal compliance audit, giving you a perspective on what’s normal and not within your organization.
Most of the data breaches across different organizations occur due to insider threats. Therefore, alongside adopting data breach investigation services, you should also have a dedicated loss prevention software. Having such software will help you track all endpoints of authorized or unauthorized access to your company’s data sources. This way, the data loss prevention software will intervene when any potential data breach is detected.
In order to address the risk of insider threats, you must follow a step-wise approach, which includes:
Take the help of insider threat investigation services to detect suspicious and malicious activity within your business networks. This way, you will be able to track the actions of your employees and get alerts for any anomalous activity.
When the suspicious activity has been reported, you must launch an insider investigation program. The professionals you hire will take responsibility for it and ensure that the failed breach attempt hasn’t escalated any attacks.
A threat prevention solution is then needed to block any potential attacker from breaking into the company’s system or data sources. You can also prevent such insider threats by deploying VPNs that will encrypt the business data.
You can then enforce diverse security policies to strengthen your cyberattack shield and data assets. Leverage the potential of cyber threat intelligence and internal audit services to find areas that need the most protection.
Insider threats are undeniably significant in the modern business world and has been growing enormous risks for organizations of all sizes. As most or all of your employees have some access to the company’s sensitive data or systems, there is a chance that they can intentionally or unintentionally carry out a cyber attack.
Therefore, you must prioritize availing of an insider investigation service, to not just detect the potential threats but also suggest ways to prevent them in the long run. At ECS, we offer comprehensive insider threat investigation services, ensuring the prevention of data breaches and system compromises.
Insider threat is better understood as a common type of cyberattack that originates from an existing or former employee working for the organization.
You need a thorough insider threat detection program in order to monitor the activities of users and gain real-time data on network activities. This way, you will be able to take immediate action anytime a security incident takes place.
Some of the risks that are caused by an unavoidable insider threat are: