Protecting your organization's data and information requires in-depth knowledge of insider threats, which pose an increasingly severe threat. Such attacks can have lasting ramifications for any business's security and financial stability.
What is an Insider Threat Indicators?
Insider threats are cyber security risks posed EDR by employees, contractors, business associates, or anyone accessing an organization's networks and systems. An insider threat may include fraud, theft of confidential data, or even acts that sabotage its cybersecurity systems.
Insider threats pose an often underestimated and grave danger to an organization's reputation, finances, and productivity - often more so than external hackers or cybercriminals.
Employees with legitimate access to sensitive data or parts of a company's network are frequently the targets of an insider attack, intentional or accidental, with motivations for harming such as revenge or financial gain being high on their agenda.
Insider risks can be more challenging to prevent and detect than threats from outside your organization, as they're already on your network. But you can still minimize this risk with tools such as zero-trust networks that monitor traffic behaviors or limit employee access who don't meet business needs.
Protection of data and networks against insider threats is of utmost importance for protecting intellectual property, trade secrets, customer data, and other critical assets from being exposed or destroyed by insider threats. An insider attack could damage an organization's reputation, disrupt operations, delay response times, cause financial losses, and jeopardize customer relations - potentially harming its financial standing and customers.
Malicious insiders can cause havoc for an organization by stealing sensitive or proprietary data, corrupting systems, and wiping out databases - for financial gain, revenge, or political ideology. These threats must be carefully managed.
Types of Insider Threat Indicators
One way to detect insider threats is by observing employee behaviors with access to sensitive data, including monitoring communication habits and work schedules. If an employee seems discontented with their current position, this may motivate them to plan an attack against their employer.
Another sure sign of an insider threat is when someone leaves your company voluntarily or involuntarily and takes with them valuable data to use in their next role when employees start using personal devices and storage systems to store or forward strategic plans and templates from former employers, that could indicate that they plan to take any information they can find from former colleagues with them.
Disgruntled employees with unresolved grievances against their company often decide to use its assets against it to exact revenge against it, such as by stealing confidential files and information, such as patents and inventions, to sell them for profit.
Insider threats present themselves through employee discontent, often resulting from dissatisfaction with company policies and motivation to gain financial gain through their actions. While such insider threats may seem uncommon, these cases rarely occur.
Malicious insiders present a more complex threat than negligent insiders. Malicious insiders don't just make mistakes but actively steal or degrade company systems for financial, vengeful, or personal gain.
Malicious insiders pose the highest threat, given they possess access to your organization's systems and can engage in all harmful activities ranging from espionage, fraud, intellectual property theft, and sabotage.
Security breach actors can either operate independently or cooperate with third parties such as competitors, nation-states, or criminal networks - leading to releasing sensitive corporate data or disrupting business operations.
Whenever an employee displays any of these behaviors, it should be immediately addressed by a CISO or security experts. They should then be monitored closely and given strict guidelines as to their future conduct - no resources not related to their job function should be made accessible, nor should these employees assume more responsibility than necessary.
Potential insider threat indicators
Monitor internal user behaviors to spot insider threat activity and take appropriate measures before threats escalate into more severe problems.
An employee downloading large volumes of sensitive information without authorization could indicate that they're trying to exfiltrate company information from the organization, prompting security teams to investigate further.
Employees frequently traveling outside their country could also be engaging in corporate espionage; it may indicate they're working for another company or government agency and using trusted access to transfer sensitive data.
Organizations that fear an internal threat have access to tools designed to detect unauthorized data movement. Some agencies specialize in pinpointing tiny data exfiltration attempts, while others allow organizations to monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic from their network.
Effective identity security strategies can be an invaluable way of mitigating insider threats from cloud computing environments and on-premises enterprises. A robust identity security approach can reduce unauthorized access to systems and data and stop employees from disclosing information to third parties or leaking confidential data to third parties while helping prevent phishing attacks or any form of malware that could lead to costly data breaches.
What Are Insider Threat Indicators Risk Characteristics?
Insider threat risk characteristics are individual traits that help security leaders identify potential insider threats. Such personality characteristics include aggression, emotional detachment, confrontation, disengagement strain, and lack of remorse - features often tied to events that trigger an insider threat, like negative financial outcomes or unfulfilled career aspirations.
Malicious insider threats typically seek to steal data, disrupt operations or cause irreparable harm to a company or its reputation. Their attacks tend to be financially motivated and involve fraud, corporate sabotage, espionage, or collusion when an attacker recruits an insider with malicious intentions to steal sensitive information on their behalf.
Continuous monitoring and attack surface management solutions can also assist in identifying suspicious activities by scanning computing systems and networks for vulnerabilities, prioritizing them accordingly, and issuing alerts when action must be taken.
Additionally, modern cybersecurity monitoring tools offer insight into suspicious traffic behaviors that might otherwise go undetected through manual processes. These solutions can ingest and analyze large volumes of data while sending alerts for abnormal activity that would otherwise go undetected.
To protect your organization from an insider threat, the best strategy is to establish and implement a robust security program with employee awareness training for all staff, including security staff. This will reduce risks by keeping employees from increasing security risk levels further and decreasing the likelihood that an insider could successfully obtain information or damage the business from insider sources.
FAQ Section
Detecting insider threats can be challenging because the individuals involved have authorized credentials, making it difficult to identify unauthorized or suspicious activity. The key is to identify unusual behavior promptly to prevent potential security breaches.
Indicators of an insider threat include sudden increases in data downloads, sending large amounts of data outside the company, and using methods like Airdrop to transfer files.
Significant indicators of an insider threat include unusual login behavior, unauthorized access to applications, abnormal employee behavior, and instances of privilege escalation.
Compromised employees or vendors pose the highest risk as both parties are unaware of their compromised status, making it challenging to detect and mitigate the threat.
