Perhaps because of their incredible scope or shocking prevalence, data breaches are creating a lot of buzz right now. It seems like a new event is happening every week, and while businesses rightly fear an attack from an external source, insider threats represent a hidden risk, accounting for a significant number of data breaches.
As we hear about major incidents in the Albania Email List media, the truth is that no business is immune from the danger of insider threats. Fortunately, companies are quickly recognizing this new dynamic.
According to a recent report from CA Technologies, 90% of organizations feel vulnerable to insider attacks. Indeed, the financial impact, the loss of basic IPs and the damage to the reputation of the brand are cascading problems that can shake the very foundations of any SME.
However, since insiders, including employees, vendors, and partners, are already part of the organization’s trusted network, standard cybersecurity measures typically designed to defend against outside attacks are not adequate for protect the organization against these accidental or malicious “internal enemies”.
Therefore, organizations should examine user activity and behavior and adopt a data loss prevention strategy focused on user behavior to effectively defend against insider threats. Here are ten tips for building a insider threat prevention strategy:
1. Implement a risk assessment methodology
When it comes to data security, operating without a plan is sure to fail. In today’s digital environment where data breaches and breaches are uncomfortably common, every organization needs a holistic approach to data security.
In other words, the only way to effectively protect data is to analyze and assess every aspect of an organization’s data landscape and adopt a methodology to continually assess existing risk protection strategies. in place. This includes identifying vulnerable assets and weak access points, while observing risk trends and mitigating opportunities for failure.
While implementing a risk assessment methodology requires a holistic whole-organization approach, implementing the right technology, such as comprehensive employee monitoring software, may be next. natural step to identify and prevent a devastating data loss event.
2. Monitor employee activity and react to suspicious behavior
Advances in machine learning and other supporting technologies allow companies to build user profiles so that abnormal behaviors can be identified and investigated.
For example, frequent late shifts, printing more documents than normal, or copying large amounts of data from external drives can be an indication of possible malicious behavior.
Of course, other more subtle activities can also be a red flag. Powerful employee monitoring software equipped with optical character recognition (OCR) and context analysis capabilities can detect when employees are looking for hacking-related topics, increased complaints or feelings of anger expressed through internet chats , or a sudden decline in work-related activities. These signals can all serve as a precursor to intent to steal data.
While these behaviors don’t necessarily indicate a data breach, they could mean anything for early detection, and they deserve a response and investigation.
3. Collect and record data for forensic examination
When a data loss event occurs, organizations need to understand what happened so they can improve their practices and close security holes.
In short, data security has both an educational component and a deterrent component, and both require digital forensics.
Therefore, recording sessions when employees access sensitive information, maintaining data access logs, and maintaining digital activity tracks can equip IT administrators with the investigative capabilities needed to assess the threat. and strengthen protocols to prevent it from happening again.
4. Minimize the threat by limiting access to secure resources
The Internet is a vast ecosystem with a myriad of websites and applications that, taken together, represent both an opportunity and a threat to organizations that strive to protect their data.
To limit their exposure, businesses should determine and implement a whitelist and blacklist for useful or even dangerous websites or applications. Additionally, for the inevitable gray area between whitelists and blacklists, IT administrators should be made aware of access to unknown applications so that they can assess usage and take action if necessary.
5. Classify sensitive data and set up perimeter rules
Not all data is created the same, and some data is more sensitive than others. More importantly, not all employees need to have access to all of the organization’s data. Classify sensitive data as such and limit access to employees who actually need the information.
