The unfortunate thing about threats, risk to your data, information and security is that it starts internally little wonder it is called an Insider threat. Most attacks on business security and information are not cases of a well designed malicious masks and glove wearing group called Hackers.
What is an Insider Threat?
An insider threat occurs when an authorised person uses his or her authority to illegally access information that will negatively affect the Integrity, Availability and Confidentiality of a company, it’s Data and its personnel and other associated resources. In order words, any individual or group of individuals that use their privy to information privileges to cause harm to the company is an insider threat. While some of these threats might be malicious, complacent, some are unintentional, but they are still classified as insider threats.
When asked, most companies claim they are free from insider threat, which is largely false and thus false spread of confidentiality has led to the creation of some myths and neglect of key security details to be put in place to mitigate such threats.
Such myths includes:
- There is nothing like an insider threat, all threats are external.
- If there is any threat , it will be for big companies and government agencies.
Myths like these and more have created an illusion that insider threats are not a big claim and companies have relaxed or unfortunately some have scrapped their mitigation system against such threats.
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What to do now?
Creating a mitigation process or system against such occurrences or recurrence is very key. These Includes:
- Identifying the threat areas: Some threats are so insignificant, that they might be easily overlooked, especially if they are unintentional. Violating of some basic rules here and there, bosses are mostly tempted to overlook it. Companies should learn to monitor all activity and hold everyone accountable for his or her mistakes.
- Develop a culture of interdependence and shared responsibilities: Develop the system in a way that no man is independent enough to take an action, there must be a report and check back system in place.
- Create an inside out security approach that is capable of catching on to both internal and external threats. Use of monitoring tools like Vulnerability management tool, cloud security monitoring tools and others.
- Trust and Verify: While some employees are outstanding and some departments are doing very great and you trust them, it is expedient to verify if all security processes are followed and all recaution are adhered to.
As more and more small cases like this begin to come up within an organization, it’s easier to justify that it’s not just the highly publicized external attacks that can ruin businesses, insider threat incidents can be just as dangerous if identified and dealt with quickly.
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