How To Protect Your Business Against Insider Threats

When it comes to assessing threats, businesses are constantly looking outwards to the malicious external forces that put them at risk. But unfortunately, the biggest problems are often created by internal agents.

Corporate espionage has been a concern for decades, but in the digital age, it is even easier for insiders to steal vast volumes of sensitive information and leave your business exposed. Some believe that such attacks are the main obstacle that modern firms face today.

Tackle Insider Threats

Tackling insider threats is possible with modern security solutions, so here is a look at the steps that you can take to counteract this common, costly issue.

Detecting Illicit Activity

The expense of suffering an insider breach event has crept up over the years, hitting $8.7 million (£6.4 million) on average, according to the latest Ponemon Institute figures.

While discouraging disgruntled employees from exploiting their privileges to damage your organization is the ideal solution, it is not realistically possible to completely rule out the likelihood of this type of breach occurring.

The best option is to counteract this by investing in a solution designed to track user activity across all networks and devices related to your firm. By being able to know exactly what everyone is up to while using your infrastructure and device ecosystem, you will be able to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to guilty parties in the event of an insider-derived breach. And more importantly, you will be able to detect untoward activities as soon as they occur so that damage can be limited or avoided in the first place.

It can also be useful to invest in penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities and check whether or not your security systems and failsafes are working as intended. This will give you confidence that any attempt to subvert your IT, whether from without or within, will be thwarted at the earliest opportunity.

Squashing Bad Habits

Negligence can be just as big an issue for businesses as deliberate malicious actions when it comes to data security. And employees may put an organization at risk without realizing, often by failing to adhere to internal policies, or by using hardware in a way that does not comply with relevant regulations.

By being able to track user activities and analyze behavior, it is possible to identify bad habits that could lead to more serious issues further down the line. These can then be addressed through training, rather than being allowed to fester.

It is crucial for an organization to be able to distinguish between negligent behaviors and those that are actively intended to subvert security and do harm to the business as a whole. This is where the services that Dtex offers come into their own once again.

In-depth reporting and user profiling can be used to keep tabs on how specific people are using internal systems. Then if abnormalities are detected, or suspicions are raised for any reason, an automated alert will notify you of this in real-time.

Furthermore, the fact that this can all be carried out without compromising the privacy protections which apply to individual employees means that your business will stay on the right side of the law, without compromising on security.

Of course, some users will have bad habits baked-in before they even join the organization, which might make you think that their activities will be harder to identify as being problematic. Thankfully a platform like that offered by Dtex comes with a library of thousands of behavior patterns. These are pulled from past investigations and make it straightforward to zero in on problematic uses of IT resources from day one.

In a busy organisation, you can expect your devices, networks, and data to be a hive of activity of all kinds, most of which should be focused on boosting productivity and empowering the business. Tackling things like data exfiltration, IP theft and other undesirable breaches with a solution designed to curb the threat posed by malicious insiders is the only way to ensure crucial protection is available, especially at a time when cybersecurity risks are growing.