The term insider threat refers to individuals with access to systems and internal information about the organization. The term can be applied to employees, ex-employees, temporary staff, contractors, or partners with authorized access to the organization’s data, files, and applications.
Insider threats are typically divided into the following categories:
We’ll provide a variety of best practices, technologies, and tools that can help you prevent insider threats in the first place and detect them when they occur.
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Consider using the following best practices to prevent insider threats.
Establish a comprehensive security policy that includes procedures for detecting and blocking misuse by insiders. The policy should also consider the consequences of potential insider threats and provide guidelines for investigating misuse.
Establish an ongoing, proactive threat detection program in collaboration with your leadership team. Ensure you keep executives informed on the scope of malicious code reviews, with all privileged users treated as potential threats.
Restrict physical and logical access to critical infrastructure and sensitive information using strict access controls. By applying least privileged access policies to limiting employee access and applying stronger identity verification systems such as biometric authentication, you can reduce the risk of insider threats.
Your organization’s CISO should analyze your internal teams and map each employee’s likelihood to become a threat. You cannot rely on your developers to apply fixes and prevent insider threats if the adversary could be those individuals.
Apply threat modeling at a large scale to better understand your threat landscape, including threat vectors related to malicious code or vulnerabilities. Identify who might compromise your system and how they might access your assets. Understanding potential attack vectors allows you to put in place the proper security controls.
Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) and safe password practices to make it harder for attackers to steal credentials. Passwords should be complex and unique. MFA helps prevent infiltrators from accessing your system even if they have user IDs and passwords.
Place access controls and monitor access to data to prevent lateral movements and protect your organization’s intellectual property.
Purge your directory of orphan and dormant accounts immediately, and continuously monitor for unused accounts and privileges. Ensure that non-active users, such as former employees, can no longer access the system or your sensitive data.
Investigate any unusual activity that occurs in your organization’s LAN to identify misbehaving employees. Behavior monitoring and analysis can help you identify and stop insider threats. However, you need to make sure you understand the monitoring laws that apply to you.
Consider using the following best practices to detect insider threats.
Related content: Read our guide to insider threat indicators
Detect unauthorized account access early to allow users to reset their passwords and restore compromised accounts. Behavioral analysis can help to unearth unusual patterns of behavior. Malicious actors can compromise accounts via phishing attacks, drive-by web hijacks, or malware installed on workstations.
Conduct sentiment analysis to determine the feelings and intentions of individuals. You can perform regular analysis to identify whether an employee is under stress, experiencing financial troubles, or performing poorly. Combined with HR information and user access history, employee sentiment can help you identify potential malicious insiders.
Carefully control and monitor access by third parties to protect your system against compromised third-party vendors and contractors. You cannot maintain the security of third-party environments, but you can minimize the trust you give to third parties within your environment.
Encourage your employees to participate in the organization’s insider threat detection efforts actively. Here’s how employees can help:
Auditing is a critical component of the threat detection process. It can help detect insider threats and fraud in a user’s activity history. Ideally, you should conduct audits regularly to ensure timely detection and prevention. Audits can help you discover standard patterns of behavior to use as a baseline when investigating anomalous activity. You can perform manual audits or use an automated tool.
A manual auditing process involves the evaluation of several systems. The goal is to identify what actions users performed and connect these actions with the relevant transactions, roles, and other associated outcomes. Once you spot suspicious or anomalous activity, you can investigate further.
Modern technology can significantly improve the auditing process. Particularly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help accurately and quickly detect deviations from standard user behavior. Once suspicious events are detected, the tool alerts stakeholders. You can use various tools to capture data and provide capabilities that make the auditing process more efficient. Notable technologies include:
Here are several technologies you can use for insider threat detection and prevention.
To discover more solutions, read our blog: Top 15 Insider Threat Solutions
User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) technology automates the security auditing process. UEBA software is designed to monitor employee activity over time, using machine learning to determine a baseline for normal behavior over a certain period. Once it establishes a baseline activity profile, it uses this information to detect anomalous behavior and automatically alert the relevant administrator.
Employee monitoring software keeps track of user activities, making it possible to identify and investigate anomalous behaviors. You can use employee monitoring systems to investigate individual users. However, the majority of these systems are not designed to provide an overview of organizational activity.
Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions aggregate security information from multiple sources to enable centralized analysis and management. These tools can capture events from various employee activities across applications and alert administrators when predefined events or activities occur.
Pathlock Control is a comprehensive insider threat management solution that can detect, automatically react to, and proactively prevent insider threats within your most critical business applications. It seamlessly integrates with the leading business applications, including SAP, Oracle, and Workday, to monitor all user activity and stop any unauthorized attempts to access, modify, or delete sensitive data.
Critical business applications are often overlooked aspects of the enterprise application infrastructure. Over 77% of financial transactions touch an SAP system, which drives incredible costs for downtime. Downtime in an SAP system can cost over $1,000,000 per hour, and insider threats and sabotage can be a major driver of application outages.
Pathlock utilizes deep User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to proactively detect potential insider threats. These algorithms, trained on real-life behavior patterns, can identify suspicious activity that, while not posing any immediate threats, might have detrimental consequences in the future. Whenever an incident like this escalates, Pathlock immediately revokes all permissions from the bad actor until the security team steps in for a review.
With Pathlock, customers can enjoy a complete solution to insider threat management that can monitor user activity to prevent risk before it happens:
Interested to find out more about how Pathlock is changing the future of insider threat management? Request a demo to explore the leading solution for enforcing compliance and reducing risk.
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