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Three Ways to Reduce Insider Threat Risks During COVID-19

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Months into the pandemic, organizations have recovered from the initial emergency of trying to ensure that their employees could safely work from home. They now realize that this remote reality will be extended—and they need to determine if they have the right cybersecurity protections in place. Most importantly, they need to stop insider threats, which account for more than 30% of all data breaches.

A long-term commitment to remote work requires a commitment to stopping data loss due to compromised, negligent, or malicious insiders. According to the Ponemon Institute, before the pandemic, the average annual global cost of insider threats rose by 31% in two years to $11.45 million, and the frequency of incidents spiked by 47% in the same period. Security teams are in a constant battle to stop cybercriminals from stealing employee credentials, prevent malicious employee action, and correct accidental user behaviors—all of which can result in unintended data loss. Three ways to reduce insider threat risk are:

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Insider Threat Risk Assessment

Each organization has a unique set of risks from insider threats. Be sure to complete a comprehensive risk assessment to identify your most important data and systems, who can access them, and the security controls you have in place to protect your organization. It is important to remember that data loss potential increases every time new information is created and stored. An organization’s most valuable assets (its people, including employees, contractors and partners) can also become its greatest vulnerability without sufficient data controls in place.

After assessing your environment, focus on identifying key risks and weaknesses to address. Successful elements include building a dedicated insider threat function to protect sensitive data, investing in training, and providing real-time policy reminders for users. Work with your HR team to educate and empower employees in subjects like secure data handling, security awareness, and vigilance. Following these steps will address and mitigate insider threats while establishing consistent, repeatable processes that are fair to all employees.

2. Place People at the Center

From a risk standpoint, organizations must place people at the center of their overall cybersecurity strategy—especially as the workforce becomes more distributed. According to Proofpoint, more than 99% of cyberattacks require human interaction to be successful. Chances of a successful attack only increase when employees are remote. Ultimately, data does not just get up and walk away—it requires someone to perform an action. So a people-centric security approach is necessary to mitigate critical risks across email, the cloud, social media and the web.

First, significantly limit access to non-essential data. Second, limit how long specific users can access the information they need to complete a task. For example, not everyone needs access to customer records. Be sure your security technology can differentiate between malicious acts, accidental behavior, and cybercriminal attacks using compromised employee accounts. This intelligence helps organizations respond according to the incident and provides context around the activities that took place.

Finally, detecting and preventing insider threats is a team sport. It is important to ensure the right stakeholders from each department are involved in your security program. This should include operations, human resources, IT, legal, and of course security.

3. Insider Threat Technology at Work

Organizations need to take a holistic approach to combating insider threats, especially during the pandemic. When assessing insider threat technology, be sure to first consider the performance impact of any solution and its associated scalability, ease of management, deployment, stability and flexibility. Select a solution that provides visibility into user behavior while complementing the tools your organization already uses.

A dedicated insider threat solution reduces threats by helping organizations identify user risk, prevent data loss, and accelerate incident response. This approach also distinguishes malicious acts from simply careless or negligent behavior.

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A more comprehensive cybersecurity program, while also putting training in place, can address negligent behavior before it becomes a security concern.

In 2020, everything about how and where we work changed.

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Unfortunately, both external and insider data breaches are accelerating. Organizations are losing more data due to compromised, negligent, or malicious insiders, so it is time to place people at the center of your cybersecurity strategy. Today’s COVID-19 reality weighs heavily on security teams.
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An effective combination of people, process, and technology can help remediate one of the most critical risk factors facing organizations around the world today.

Should Companies Ban USBs?

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Earlier this month, a Chinese woman was arrested after attempting to enter President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort while in possession of a number of suspicious electronic devices, including a USB flash drive. Apparently, the drive contained code that allows malicious software to run immediately after being plugged in, though it is still unclear what kind of malware it was. According to news reports, law enforcement also found nine other USB drives in the woman’s hotel room. If someone was able to connect a USB device to a computer on the resort’s network, attackers might be able to access all sorts of sensitive information and potentially gain control of machines on the network.

Historically, USB use has also aided insider threats, whether in the form of employees inadvertently infecting a corporate device or network with a found USB drive, or purposefully causing an infection or removing sensitive information via USB. In perhaps one the most high-profile of such cases, Edward Snowden reportedly removed NSA documents from a Hawaii facility on a flash drive before fleeing the country and providing those documents to members of the media.

Beyond the headlines, these devices continue to pose everyday risks. People mindlessly plug in flash drives, or carry their business’s most important documents on them that could accidentally be left in a hotel room or at a conference packed with corporate rivals. As companies evaluate their security policies and how to best secure their data, many are moving away from using USB or even banning them outright.

In May 2018, IBM did just that. The company’s global chief information security officer Shamla Naidoo said that IBM “is expanding the practice of prohibiting data transfer to all removable portable storage devices (eg: USB, SD card, flash drive),” and that the prohibition would apply to IBM operations worldwide, who will now rely entirely on the company’s cloud-based storage. Naidoo cited the danger of missing storage devices leading to “financial and reputational damage” as the motivation for the prohibition going forward, and acknowledged that the move may be disruptive for some departments and employees.

A 2016 University of Illinois study also showed that the now-proverbial nightmare scenario of an employee inserting a USB they found in a parking lot is actually realistic. After dropping 297 flash drives on a university campus, researchers found that people opened one or more files on 45% of the drives without taking any precautions, and that people moved 98% of the drives from the drop locations. The study’s authors noted that their results suggested that people may have picked up the drives and opened files motivated by altruism (finding the owner) and curiosity. But regardless of intent, simply plugging a flash drive into company computer can unleash any number of viruses, malware, or other cyber maladies on the company’s network.

Of course, doing away with USBs is also not a security panacea. As always, the user is the weakest part of any IT security plan, and even if a business does decide to ban USB storage devices and move their data storage to cloud-based options, employees should still be trained on password protection strategies and other security hygiene best practices. To make employee cyber-awareness training more effective, check out these tips from Risk Management.

Fraud Incidents Rise in 2016, Kroll Finds

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Reports of fraud have risen in the past year. In fact, incidences of every type of fraud have reached double-digit levels, according to the Kroll Global Fraud & Risk Report 2016/2017. Overall, 82% of executives reported falling victim to at least one instance of fraud in the past year, up from 75% in 2015.

Theft of physical assets remained the most prevalent type of fraud in the last year, reported by 29% of respondents, up 7 percentage points from 22% of respondents in the last survey. Kroll reported that vendor, supplier, or procurement fraud (26%) and information theft, loss, or attack (24%) were the next two most common types of fraud cited, each up 9 percentage points year-over-year.

Kroll found that most threats come from within an organization, with current and ex-employees being the most frequently cited perpetrators of fraud, cyber, and security incidents over the past 12 months. External parties were also identified as active perpetrators.

In the United States:
Kroll-fraud

• On the complexity of fraud risks, the majority (60%) of executives who reported suffering fraud incidents identified some combination of perpetrators, including current employees, ex-employees, and third parties, with almost half (49%) involving all three groups.

• Almost four in 10 respondents (39%) who were victims experienced fraud perpetrated by a junior employee, 30% by senior or middle management, 27% by ex-employees, and 27% by freelance/temporary employees. Agents and/or intermediaries were also cited by 27% of respondents as involved in carrying out fraud.

• Insiders were cited as the main perpetrators of fraud, and also identified as the most likely to discover it. Almost half (44%) of respondents said that recent fraud had been discovered through a whistleblowing system and 39% said it had been detected through an internal audit.

Among anti-fraud measures, the widest adoption—reported by 82% of executives surveyed—focused on information, such as IT security and technical countermeasures. The converse of the finding is concerning: nearly one out of five respondents (18%) have not adopted such protections.
kroll fraud risk

According to the report:

80% of respondents in the U.S. experienced fraud in the past 12 months, an increase of 5 percentage points on the previous year. This figure is 2 percentage points below the reported global average of 82%. Intellectual property (IP) theft, piracy, or counterfeiting is a clear threat to companies in the U.S., which was reported by just over a quarter (27%) of U.S. participants, almost twice the reported global average. The U.S. was the only country where IP theft was the most common type of fraud reported. Information theft, loss, or attack was the second most mentioned type of fraud impacting companies in the U.S., followed by conflicts of interest in the management team. The main perpetrators of fraud were reported to be insiders. Where fraud had been discovered, 36% of executives in the U.S. reported that junior employees were responsible, and 32% named senior or middle management. Respondents in the U.S. were most likely to have adopted IT security measures, followed by financial controls and asset security as their top three ways to mitigate fraud risk. In the U.S., the most common way fraud was detected was not through a whistle-blower, as it was for most of the other countries surveyed, but through an internal audit. Nearly half (49%) of U.S. participants said it was the most common detection mechanism.

Defending Against the Cyberrisk of Malicious Insiders

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An overwhelming number of businesses increasingly see their greatest cyber threats coming from within, but figuring out what to do about the risk poses a formidable gap, according to a recent study from Mimecast. The email and data security company found that 90% of organizations globally consider malicious insiders a major threat to security, yet 45% report they are ill-equipped to cope with the risk. Indeed, one in seven IT security decision-makers view malicious insiders as their number one threat.

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Current measures to guard against this risk may still leave significant exposure, and IT managers appear to know it. Those who say they are very equipped on cybersecurity feel virtually just as vulnerable to insider threats as those who believe they are not equipped at all (16% vs. 17%), “indicating that the risk of malicious insiders trumps perceptions of security confidence,” Mimecast reported.

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Mimecast recommends the following strategies to guard against the risk of malicious insiders:

  1. Assign role-based permissions to administrators to better control access to key systems and limit the ability of a malicious insider to act.
  2. Implement internal safeguards and data exfiltration control to detect and mitigate the risk of malicious insiders when they do strike, to cut off their ability to send confidential data outside the network.
  3. Offer creative employee security training programs that deter potential malicious insiders in the first place and help others to spot the signs so they can report inappropriate activity to their managers. Then, back that up with effective processes to police and act swiftly in the event of an attack.
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  4. Nurture a culture of communication within teams to help employees watch out for each other and step in when someone seems like they’ve become disenchanted or are at risk of turning against the company.
  5. Train your organization’s leadership to communicate with employees to ensure open communication and awareness.

Check out more of the study’s findings in the infographic below:

mimecast_5-tips-to-defend-infographic