Insider threats are a risk that can potentially destroy your organization. Learn how to protect yourself in this quick guide.
Perhaps because of their shocking presence or incredible scope, data breaches are making a lot of buzz in the news. It seems that a new event occurs every week, and while companies fear attacks from an external source, the internal threats have a hidden risk, accounting for a large number of data breaches.
While we hear this information from the media, the truth is that there’s no business that is safe from the problem of insider threats. Fortunately, companies are starting to understand and recognize this new dynamic.
Based on a CA Technologies’ recent report, 90% o organizations stated that they felt vulnerable to insider attacks. Indeed, the loss of core IPs, financial impact, and the loss of main IPs are cascading problems that can shake the foundation of any available SME.
Therefore, organizations need to look at behavior monitoring and user activity and create a user-behavior driven data loss prevention strategy to protect themselves from insider threats. Here are some tips to help develop a good insider threat prevention system.
Integrate SIEMs and DLP for Better Coverage
When looking at your company’s network infrastructure, you need to attain as much security coverage as possible. Because of this, get a solution that provides a unified data loss prevention and a unified insider detection.
A real-time, responsive DLP framework that integrates with SIEMs provide insight into data management protocols and offer real alert management for better security coverage.
Collect and Save Your Data for Forensic Examination
When a data leak event occurs, companies have to understand what happened so they can seal up security holes and improve their practices. In short, there’s deterrence and educational component to data security, and both require digital forensics.
Thus, recording sessions when employees can access sensitive information, keeping logs for data access and sustaining the different activity trails can give IT admins the investigative capabilities needed to evaluate threats and to strengthen protocols to prevent it from happening again.
Monitor Employee Activity and Behavior
Technological advances to machine learning allow companies to create user profiles so that odd behavior can be investigated after being spotted.
For instance, copying a substantial amount of data, printing out more documents than normal, or frequent late shifts are a clear indication of possible malicious behavior.
Of course, having other subtle activities can be another red flag as well. Powerful insider threat software that has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can detect when your employees are searching up topics such as hacking, a decline in work-related duties, or an increase in complaints. All of these systems are signs that your employee wants to steal your data.
While these behaviors won’t indicate a data breach, they can mean everything for early detection and are worthy of an investigation and response.
Conclusion
To conclude, insider threat software is necessary if you want your business to thrive. Insider and external threats happen every day, and the only way to protect your company is through preparation. So take the proactive steps and get the software needed to protect your company today!
