No organization wants to believe that they’re under threat from the inside, but it happens every day. Insider threats come in many shapes and sizes, and they originate from within the standard security perimeter. Attacks that come from outside the organization are almost always intentional and malicious, but insider attacks can be either an accidental breach or intentional in nature.
Your company faces insider risks due to shadow IT installations, borrowed or stolen credentials, loss of a company device, negligence, and human error. Yet though these attack vectors are known to be a root cause of data breaches, many organizations are not addressing this risk category. That must change if companies hope to keep their networks and data safe.
How Insider Threats Differ From External Threats
While external attackers hunt for a means of getting around Web Application Firewalls, Bot detection, and API Security measures, insiders are already within these perimeter defenses. Any individual who can access the system is a potential threat: current employees, partners, third parties such as contractors, and former employees who still have active access.
Examples of insider threats include:
- An insider is negligent, not following policies created to prevent the access of sensitive data.
- An individual willingly attempts to take systems down or steal data.
- A well-meaning person stumbles upon data that they likely have no business accessing.
Insider Threats Must Not Be Ignored
Industry reports reveal that organizations are usually better at defending their networks from outsider cyber threats than focusing on insider threats. Consequently, even though organizations recognize the serious nature of insider threats, their IT systems remain vulnerable.
This is an unfortunate oversight, leaving companies open to great danger. New and worsening insider threats are arising as a result of enabling too much access to managed applications for average users – as well as the rising concern of shadow IT, which is the use of applications not authorized or managed by IT teams. One study found that 85% of surveyed organizations anticipated that insider-driven information loss will increase over the coming year and that the average cost of an insider incident was $15 million.
As if that weren’t enough to contend with, external attacks are becoming more sophisticated. In fact, most don’t bother trying to get through cybersecurity measures. Rather, they attempt to circumvent those measures and attack from within. They use methods like social engineering and phishing to dupe insiders into sharing hashes or credentials. At the same time, more and more SaaS applications are being deployed – and many are being used outside IT’s purview, creating the potential for data breaches to occur unnoticed by the systems and policies implemented to protect against such incidents.
Organizations need to know who is coming and going, and who is taking on a new role. Then they need to apply policies that ensure access compliance. These policies and processes give your organization visibility into who’s accessing your systems and applications, and they help prevent possible security gaps from opening. If a data breach occurs, having your policy and process ducks in a row will help you act fast – which is necessary to maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR.
How to Find Indicators of Insider Threat
Insider threats are tricky because they’re harder to detect and have the potential to cause greater damage. They require vigilance and an understanding of potential insider threat indicators, which will help you gain greater cyber awareness. Pay attention to these early threat indicators for clues that an inside attack could be happening:
Attempts to gain access to unauthorized data or applications: One of the easiest ways to spot insider threats is by seeing a user’s repeated attempts to get at a network resource that they have no business accessing.
Out-of-character behavior: Watch for uncharacteristic behavioral and social cues from employees, particularly if there is a significant change. For instance, pay attention to an employee who starts picking fights with others or whose work performance slides for no discernible reason. Such actions could signal a disgruntled mindset that’s willing to attack the company.
Shadow IT: Investigate any user attempting to install software outside the normal permissions process or any SaaS applications unmanaged by IT.
How IGA Helps Mitigate the Risk of Insider Threats
Defending your network and the data it holds requires a delicate balance. You must secure systems so workers and other insiders can’t access data outside their job role. You must also grant users enough access so they can perform their roles unimpeded.
To do this, you’ll need to use a comprehensive identity and access management tool, alongside strict enforcement of procedures and policies, which will enable your business operations to run smoothly without unnecessary exposure to risk.
An identity governance and administration (IGA) tool is a fundamental defense against insider threats. It’s so effective because it can help ensure the right people have access to the right applications for the right amount of time with the right level of access. And when proper access drifts, IGA enables you to correct it.
IGA tools enable organizations to manage their identities in a streamlined manner. This ability extends to access privileges and user accounts, too. This approach enables employees, contractors, and other legitimate users to access the network resources they need – and no others.
IGA can act on a situation-dependent basis, automatically granting and revoking access rights as needed. For instance, if there is concern that an account has been compromised, the IGA solution can cut off all privileges so the account can’t go further into the network. The solution can also find and remove orphaned accounts, which could otherwise be easily used for insider attacks.
IGA tools also constantly watch user activity via their monitoring and analytics capabilities. If the solution finds an anomaly, it can immediately take the precautionary measure of locking out that account. You could say that having IGA is equivalent to having a network watchdog that doesn’t sleep.
A Partnership that Performs
iC Consult and Omada have joined forces to assist businesses in the digital transformation process. Together, we accelerate time to value by implementing best-practice methods for solution design and deployment. These methods reduce customer risk and ensure good identity governance.
Joint customers enjoy these advantages:
- Ensured project success via implementation and deployment of the solution, led by the two companies’ overall objective.
- Access to an enterprise-class, highly evolved and cloud-based IGA.
- Ongoing operational management that includes long-term support and enables rapid time to value. Rather than taking a year or more, Omada is known for completing IGA implementations successfully in three months.
To learn more about how our partnership can help you keep insider threats at bay, visit Omada.
