September marks the fourth annual U.S. National Insider Threat Awareness Month, a time meant to increase awareness for the workforce to learn more about the serious risks posed by insider threats and how to recognize and report anomalous/threatening activities to enable early intervention.
This is also a time when security experts at IT software and security experts chip in. Digital Journal has heard from security leads at the company HelpSystems surrounding insider threat awareness.
First up is Bob Erdman, Director of Development, Threat Intelligence. According to Erdman: “Insider threats are not only malicious, but many times they are accidental.”
He goes on to explain this as being part of a division between malicious actors and well-meaning employees: “A purposeful user may be upset and want to cause damage to the organization, or they may be motivated by monetary gains (bribes) and disclose information to third parties. They may even be placed there by outside actors looking to gain knowledge of practices, procedures and intellectual property.”
Erdman adds: “More and more there are instances of nation states engaging in this industrial espionage.”
Taking the employee, Erdman states: “On the other hand, accidental compromise is also very common. Users fall victim to malicious phishing or BEC scams and expose their credentials or other damaging information about the organization that is then used by malicious actors to gather intelligence and potentially cause damage to the user’s company. This is not only a problem for the employees of the organization but also can be caused by any third party partner, contractor or member of the supply chain that can be used as an initial entry point into the final target’s enterprise.”
The second to pitch in is John Grancarich, EVP, Strategy. Grancarich shows how easy errors can occur, noting: “One click – that’s all it takes for an unsuspecting user to be lured down the path of credential theft. And once the first set of credentials has been compromised, the front door of your organization is wide open, and it won’t stop there. So, take the time to invest in awareness and in training. It turns out that our parents’ advice to us as we were growing up is relevant to security as well: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The third and final expert is Tom Huntington, EVP of Technical Solutions. Huntington takes a different perspective on the insider risk, in outlining: “When is the greatest threat to an organization’s intellectual property? It is when that insider decides to move on to their next career advancement and they decide to take along a little intelligence that they deem not harmful but certainly puts the incumbent company’s property at risk to be shared to a competitor or outside threat.”
There are solutions to take, advises Huntington : “End point security should be able to monitor this activity and provide comprehensive reporting of all the ins and outs of the data. Did they print, use a USB or email something to their external provider? What really happened during their exit from the company? Proper data loss prevention technology should provide the tracking of your data and the prevention of this activity.”
