How to Create Awareness of Insider Threats

Insider threats have a special place in the cybersecurity hall of shame. No one likes to think that their colleague is out to get them, but unfortunately, this type of threat to organizational security is all too real.

And even the biggest companies can be affected. In May of this year, Coca-Cola admitted to a breach affecting the personal data of over 8000 employees. A former employee had stolen a hard drive containing the data.

It would be nice to say this was an unusual event, but the statistics disagree. In the 2018 Insider Threat Report from technology vendor CA Technologies, they found that 53% of respondents had suffered an insider breach during 2017. 27% saw an increase in the frequency of these types of incidents.

But just what is an insider threat? And who perpetrates them?

What is an Insider Threat?

Insider threats don’t have to be malicious; accidents happen, people make mistakes. As a general principle, there are two main categories that insider threats fall into:

Malicious Insiders – Those Who Set out to Do Harm

This is the more traditional image of the “insider” and covers areas as diverse as industrial espionage and plain computer damage. I have personally come across a number of people in the latter category. These can be employees with high levels of computing skills, often being programmers or IT administrators, who purposely installed malware onto computers after they left a company.

Malicious insiders cost companies money too. Sage, a software vendor, experienced an insider threat which affected hundreds of their customers and wiped 4% off their share value.

Accidental Insiders – Those Who Do Harm Without Intent

Accidental insiders may not be malicious, but the harm they cause can be as bad. Gemalto has described 2017 as the “The Year of Internal (Read more...)