Companies face many different types of risks to their essential IT environment. While security teams may focus on protecting their infrastructure from external threat actors, an organization’s employees and contractors pose significant risks. Almost two-thirds of companies have experienced insider data breaches in the last few years.
Businesses must implement measures to protect themselves from insider threats. A viable approach includes detecting potential insider threats and addressing them before they can cause damage. Teams must also be prepared to recover from data loss or corruption initiated by insiders.
What Are Insider Threats?
We will define insiders as individuals, either employees or contractors, who have authorized access to a company’s IT infrastructure and data resources. Insider threats misuse this access to deliberately or unintentionally compromise the IT environment. Insider threats are difficult to detect because they are already inside the network perimeter, exploiting trusted access and legitimate credentials.
Insider threats generally fall into one of the following categories.
Malicious insiders
These individuals intentionally use their authorized access to cause damage to an organization. They are typically motivated by financial gain or revenge for real or perceived grievances. A malicious insider may be working alone or collaborating with organized cybercriminal teams.
This type of insider causes damage by sabotaging systems to impact availability or steal valuable or proprietary data. Perpetrators may embed malware or ransomware into the infrastructure to trigger it at an opportune moment. They may also sell compromised credentials to other threat actors with more malevolent intentions.
Negligent insiders
Companies can be threatened by individuals who are careless or lack the security awareness needed to protect the environment. The actions of these insiders can inadvertently lead to data breaches, compromised credentials, and open the door for malware infection. Insider negligence can take many forms, including:
- Misconfiguring system security and access settings;
- Using weak passwords to secure sensitive systems and data;
- Accidentally sharing confidential data, for instance, in an unencrypted email;
- Storing sensitive data in personal cloud storage accounts;
- Being victimized by phishing attacks.
Compromised insiders
Individuals may be compromised by threat actors who hijack their accounts or obtain credentials through blackmail or phishing, enabling attackers to appear as trusted users in the IT environment. Attackers can use these credentials to bypass security controls and move laterally through the infrastructure in search of valuable targets. Compromised insiders are often the entry point for damaging ransomware attacks.
How Can You Detect Insider Threats?
Companies must handle insider threats differently from external threats. Insiders already have legitimate system access and cannot be blocked from infrastructure elements or data assets. Organizations must focus on detecting insider threats by identifying the following indicators of compromise (IoC) and their potential impacts.
- Large data downloads may be evidence of attempts to steal data.
- Off-hour access attempts may indicate unauthorized activity.
- Multiple failed logins may be due to misused credentials.
- Insiders may use external storage to exfiltrate data.
- Privilege escalation may precede attempts to gain administrative access.
The following measures can help detect these threats before they damage the business.
User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) platforms analyze user behavior via machine learning technology to establish baselines for acceptable activity. They track activities such as login time, locations, devices used, and file access. After baseline creation, a UEBA solution can detect atypical logins based on the time, location, or device used to access the environment. The tools can also identify unexpected spikes in data access and unusual privilege usage.
Privileged access monitoring (PAM) solutions are essential for tracking accounts with elevated privileges that pose the greatest insider risks. They typically focus on accounts with admin, database, or control system access. The platform can identify IoCs, including privilege escalation, unapproved security configuration changes, and abnormal admin activity.
Security information and event management (SIEM) systems gather and correlate security logs from across the environment. The platform monitors infrastructure elements, including servers, applications, network devices, and identity management systems. SIEM tools support real-time alerts and provide data for incident investigation of suspicious account activity, large data transfers, and attempts at privilege escalation or unauthorized access.
Teams can implement additional technical tools, such as endpoint and file integrity monitoring, to detect suspicious activity or unexpected changes that may indicate compromised or corrupted data.
Companies must also be wary of behavioral and organizational indicators of insider threats. Individuals may attempt to bypass security controls, violate access policies, and attempt to access systems after submitting a resignation notice.
Minimizing the Risks From Insider Threats
Companies must minimize the risk of insider threats by adopting a comprehensive strategy that combines operational policies, technical controls, and workforce awareness, including the following measures.
- Implement the principle of least privilege (PoLP) to restrict user access to only what is necessary to perform their jobs, reducing the potential damage of compromised accounts.
- Enforce strong identity and access management (IAM) controls, such as multi-factor authentication and password management policies.
- Monitor user behavior with UEBA, SIEM, and endpoint monitoring tools to detect unusual logins, privilege escalations, and large data downloads.
- Protect sensitive and valuable data with strong encryption, classification, and data loss prevention (DLP) systems to prevent unauthorized copying or downloads.
- Conduct regular security training to ensure employees are aware of secure data handling policies and can identify phishing or social engineering attacks to reduce accidental insider threats.
- Establish strong offboarding procedures to remove accounts and immediately revoke privileged access upon employee resignation or termination.
Protecting Your Business From Insider Threats
VAST’s services and solutions can help protect your company from insider threats, using security solutions from our partner, Palo Alto Networks. They offer cloud-native security solutions designed to protect modern businesses. The company’s Cortex solution provides automated incident response and security operations for cloud and hybrid environments.
Our team strengthens your security posture by identifying vulnerabilities in your IT environment using Palo Alto Security Lifecycle Review. The tool provides a view of the applications, files, and cloud services used by your employees, valuable information when developing policies to prevent unauthorized access and accidental insider risks.
Contact VAST and let us professionally assess your security posture and recommend solutions to improve your protection against insider and external threats.
