What are Insider Threats? How to deal with them?
Insider threats might correspond to the users who have legitimate access to various assets of the company such as secret corporate information, financial, and employee information. These users either use this access in a malicious or unintentional way. The insider threats don't necessarily have to be the currently working employees these could be the past working employees or company partners that are not that much involved with the present operations.
Why insider threats are so dangerous?
Due to the carelessness of the employee or phishing emails, the malware can get invited into the system and wreak havoc in its wake. This could lead to an undetected continuation of the criminal activity lurking behind the drapes that could eventually add up in the form of a cybersecurity event or breach. Following are some of the reasons as to why insider threats are so dangerous;
- Remain undetected for years; The longer it takes for the company or organization to detect a breach the more intensive the remediation costs are going to be. Insider threats can be very difficult to detect and that is why these end up being the most expensive form of threats to counterfeit.
- Differentiation between normal work and harmful actions is difficult; Another reason why these threats are so difficult to detect. When an employee is simply minding their own business it can be a little difficult to know whether they are involved in something dangerous or are simply working like normal.
- Easier to cover actions; Those are your employees out there working on a day to day basis, what are you going to do, have them strip checked, or teased until they give up their intentions? Those employees can very effectively cover their actions leaving you in the dark until you are not.
- Hard to prove guilt; Even if by some miracle you find them red-handed initiating an attack, downloading malware, or doing something they are not supposed to, you won't be able to prove them guilty. They would simply say that they made a mistake and would cave their way out of this situation.
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How to mitigate insider threats?
The insider threats might seem a little too overwhelming to deal with but in the end, these are just that; threats. With a great incident plan the insider threats can be taken care of, following are some of the things that you need to do in order to fight off the insider threats;
Running Background checks
Before you hire your employees you must run background checks on them which means that inspecting their past life or getting in touch with the companies the employee has worked before. These background checks don't need to be over-complicated, simply running their name on Google, having a look at their social media presence and getting in touch with their previous company would suffice.
The background checks might not put an end to the insider threats but it will surely present you with a great way of filtering out all suspected which you end up not hiring.
Monitoring employee behavior
The most important thing is to monitor your employee behavior, even if you are on the management level you need to be more involved in things. Such as if your employees are not happy then there are some solid chances that they might try something. Try your best to reach out to them in finding why they are unhappy. If you might be able to fix their problem then not only you will be saving yourself a lot of trouble but earning their respect as well.
Look for something fishy that is going on with your employees such as they are more active financially and are traveling around or joining the office at odd hours, all of these are the things that might point towards something crafty going on with your employees.
Control the user access
Stronger account protection can not only provide support against insider threats but it can also provide immense security against the outside threats. Following are some of the instructions that might come out as strongly recommended;
- Make sure that your employees use the complex passwords that shouldn’t be shared with other accounts
- Limit the use of the shared accounts as much as possible and prohibit the sharing of credentials between the employees. Some of the times the shared accounts are required, in that case, you must use additional authentication methods to protect all the users
- Using two-factor authentication can come out to be a great relief over and over. It requires the users to validate their identity using an additional means of authentication, it could be a second password, retinal scan, or fingerprint access.
If you want to work as a dedicated networking professional then it is recommended that you complete your CCNA security certification from CISCO and help yourself to validate the knowledge and skills that are required to become a networking professional.