An Ultimate Guide On Insider Threat Risks And Their Prevention

How To Ensure The Insider Threat Protection of Your Business

Insider risks are becoming more prevalent. Insider assaults have risen dramatically in recent years, whether they originate from unintentional insiders who are vulnerable to phishing efforts or malevolent insiders who are looking to reveal critical data. According to some surveys, 70% of cybersecurity experts feel the frequency of insider assaults has grown in the previous year. In addition, 62% of companies have had at least one insider assault in the last year. So, why are insider threats on the rise, who is to blame, and what insider threat protection measures can your company take to avoid them?

What Is An Insider Threat And Why You Should Be Aware

Insider threats are people with lawful access to corporate assets who would use this access to damage the enterprise, whether purposely or accidentally. Current workers aren’t always insider dangers. Former workers, contractors, or partners with access to an organization’s systems or confidential material might potentially be suspects.

With 40 percent of insider events involving a staffer with authorized access to corporate assets, businesses must evaluate the dangers that come within their doors daily with the same rigor they use to secure the perimeter against external attackers.

Security professionals have a difficult problem in insider threat detection. Insiders already have valid access to the organization’s information and assets, and it’s difficult to tell the difference between routine and possibly suspicious activities. Insiders are usually aware of where sensitive data is kept inside the business and have access to it. Consequently, insider threat protection is one of the most important issues the company must think of.

Insider Threat Protection

Types of Insider Threats

What distinguishes insider threats from other attacks is that the attacker is not necessarily motivated by financial gain. In other circumstances, the attacker is a dissatisfied employee who is solely motivated by a desire to damage the company. Cybersecurity insider threat detection shows that insider risks may be divided into four categories. They aren’t necessarily malevolent, but they may still have a significant financial and reputational effect.

The following are examples of malevolent insider threats:

Sabotage

The purpose of sabotage is to cause harm to a system or to destroy data. One technique to sabotage an organization’s infrastructure is not to follow maintenance or IT processes or to physically damage facilities and equipment. Another option is to delete code such that your company’s normal activities are affected.

Fraud

Insider fraud occurs when someone with access privileges to a secured network and applications utilizes that access to steal information or money. Someone who can set up vendor accounts and pay their invoices in your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform is an ideal illustration of this. The individual may establish a fictitious vendor, allocate money to an account they control, and pay the invoices to themselves.

Theft of Intellectual Property

A company’s private information is valuable, and an attacker who tries to steal it could cause long-term financial damage. This danger occurs when someone copies or takes data from your corporate network for personal or commercial advantage.

Espionage

A current or former employee might exploit his or her access to a company’s systems or data to get details, like intellectual property or private data/information, to acquire a competitive edge. A rival, for example, may seek the assistance of an employee with insider information to steal corporate secrets and other important information. If an attacker takes important trade secrets, files, or data to sell to rivals, they are subject to espionage. 

Insider Threat Prevention Best Practices

Here are some insider threat solutions to assist lower the danger of insider threats:

  • Protect vital assets, such as systems, technology, buildings, and people, which might be physical or logical. Customers’ data, proprietary software, schematics, and internal manufacturing processes are all valuable assets. Develop a thorough grasp of your important assets. Consider questions like: What key assets do you have? Is it possible to prioritize your assets? And, what do you know about each asset’s present condition?
  • Implement policies—create a comprehensive documentation of organizational policies so that you can enforce them and avoid misunderstandings. Everyone in the company should be aware of security protocols and understand their intellectual property (IP) rights so that privileged material developed by them is not shared.
  • Increase visibility by using insider threat monitoring technologies that monitor employee behaviors and correlate data from numerous sources. You may utilize deception technologies, for example, to entice a malevolent insider or impostor and obtain insight into their activities.
  • Encourage cultural changes—ensuring security includes not just knowledge but also attitudes and values. You should educate your personnel about security concerns and insider threat prevention, as well as seek to increase employee satisfaction to counteract carelessness and address the motivations of harmful activity.

SpinOne as Insider Threat Detection Solution

In the SaaS data security and management market, SpinOne is a well-known brand. Cybersecurity experts and IT created the software in 2016. SpinOne AI-powered ransomware and Backup & Recovery products are being used to secure sensitive data by over 1,500 worldwide enterprises and over 2,000,000 individual organizations. 

With SpinOne, you can secure yourself against insider threats in the following way:

  • Get access to all shared data in the SaaS cloud environment.
  • See who owns which files.
  • Use security policy file rules.
  • Audit customers who share the data.
  • Find critical info transmitted by email.
  • See and sort personal data.
  • Generate and export data audit reports if it is required.

Companies that want to safeguard all of their sensitive data employ a variety of SaaS data security solutions. SpinOne is among the most popular in 2022. It is one of the best cybersecurity insider threat detection tools that monitors your cloud data environment for unusual activity, SaaS data abuse, and other cybersecurity threats. It protects your company’s cloud data against insider threats and data abuse by continually monitoring it.