Which is a more significant threat: a hacker trying to break into your network or one who knows your systems inside and out?
The average cost of insider incidents is almost twice that of external data breaches. The kinds of threats insiders can present are more varied and often more challenging to detect.
Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) face significant risk from inside sources, whether accidental or malicious. Taking a proactive approach enables you to prevent insider risks before they develop.
Types and Sources of Internal Risk
Insider risk stems from the employees, contractors, third-party vendors, and other partners handling business data and other sensitive materials like passwords, intellectual property, and strategies. Former employees or contractors who may still have access to business data, assets, and property also generate risk.
Any of these actors can become a threat through negligence or malicious intent.
Negligence accounts for most insider threats (56%), with an average cost of nearly half a million dollars per incident. Types of unintentional risks include:
- Mishandled data resulting in leakage or regulatory compliance fines
- An external hacker steals the credentials of authorized personnel
- Falling victim to phishing and other social engineering attacks
- Not adhering to security protocols, failing to patch and install updates
Malicious activity from inside actors involves collusion (willing or not) with outside parties, attacks from disgruntled current or ex-employees, and sabotaging business operations. Motives are personal financial gain, revenge, and corporate espionage.
Types of malicious activity include:
- Data leakage to unauthorized users
- Data exfiltration to an unsanctioned location
- Deletion of digital assets, data, and databases
- Fraud and extortion
- Destruction of physical property like devices, machinery, or file servers
- Installation of malware
Using Insider Risk Management to Prevent Threats
Organizations develop Insider Risk Management (IRM) practices to detect and mitigate risks effectively before they become threats and issues.
While the list of preventative tactics is extensive, the fundamental principles of IRM center around governance, training, and technologies for intelligently assessing and addressing risks.
Governance protocols unify and guide user behavior, ensuring a consistent and centralized process for accessing and transferring data. These essential controls form the basis for alerts and red flags whenever unusual behavior is detected on the network.
When data is mishandled, it becomes a target, fully exposed to theft or deletion. Internal training on best practices removes common risks like data moving through shadow IT, which can easily be stolen or exfiltrated.
Data security and risk management technology help identify, monitor, and reduce risk. These solutions—data loss prevention (DLP), risk management, and security platforms like Microsoft Purview Insider and intrusion detection software—monitor data flows and user activity on the network, drawing from patterns of suspicious activity to send alerts and take necessary actions to protect data and assets.
A typical insider risk pattern is when employees or contractors are about to exit the company. These solutions monitor the activity and devices of high-risk personnel to assess risk and set limits to prevent data exfiltration.
How to Protect Your Business from Inside Risks
IRM provides many approaches to defending your data. Depending on your security and business priorities, you may want to incorporate all or just a selection.
Fortify the Network
Network infrastructures must adapt to a decentralized workforce and cloud-connected data landscape.
- Adopt a zero-trust stance, verifying all users and entities by default
- Micro-segment the network, putting less data at risk and increasing security for each subnet
- Make multi-factor authentication a requirement
Preventing Data Theft, Leakage, and Exfiltration
Data security solutions are essential to gaining visibility into data usage and forensics—where data sits, who has access, and how data flows—and setting guidelines to automate security protocols.
- Control access to data by different attributes—user, device, endpoint, file repository location, and application, for example
- Use AI to flag suspicious user behavior
- Regulate file transfer size, time of day, location, and file types, and take blocking actions if necessary
- Grant users access only to the resources they need (principle of least privilege)
- Add enhanced protections to email (filtering/blocking), cloud apps, endpoints, and databases—65% of sensitive data is stored in employee email
Manage Insider Risk with Dynamic Encryption
While these traditional solutions contribute significantly to insider risk management strategies, they are also essentially roadblocks to put up. Motivated, informed internal threat actors can circumvent them.
Dynamic encryption, however, is a steel wall. Instead of solely focusing on user behavior, encryption removes risk from the data itself. Even if data is exfiltrated off the network, it is useless to hackers.
This form of encryption is a top-down approach that uses data classification and intelligent policy enforcement to autonomously apply security rules, encrypt sensitive data at risk, and monitor data flows and user behavior to detect and alert about potential breaches in real time.
Many roadblocks can be erected to mitigate insider risks, but the most effective barrier is making data unreadable using dynamic encryption.
