You can hire bodyguards to protect yourself, but who will protect you if your own bodyguard starts attacking? Similarly, malicious insiders with access and privileges are a greater threat to company security than external attackers. With endpoint security software, you can quickly detect and protect your organization from insider threats.

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This article covers the following:

• What Is an Insider Threat?
• Types
• How Do Fraudsters Attack?
• Indicators
• Threat Expressions
• Detection Methods
• Preventive Best Practices
• Next Steps

What Is an Insider Threat?

An insider threat is a malicious attempt by employees, business associates or contractors to steal information and data or sabotage operations. The threat typically comes from people who are or were associated with the company by misusing their access.

According to a report by Cybersecurity Insiders and Gurucul, 74% of organizations believe that insider threats have become more frequent, increasing the risk to data safety and endpoint security.

What makes it particularly worrying is that people entrusted with keeping the company safe perpetrate it. Also, several traditional security systems can identify external threats, but signs of internal malpractices go unnoticed.

Types

Insider threats can be broadly categorized as negligent or malicious. However, a more nuanced view includes the following types:

Turncloak

Turncloaks, also known as malicious insiders, primarily focus on fraud, espionage, sabotage and data theft. They misuse their privileged access to steal information for personal or financial benefits.

Sometimes, they intentionally sabotage operations due to grudges against their seniors or colleagues. Their biggest advantage is knowledge and access to security policies and system vulnerabilities. Some of the types of turncloaks are:

Lone Wolf

They proceed with any third-party influence or manipulation and act independently. These are mostly administrators with privileged access to databases, making them particularly harmful.

Collaborator

Collaborators are employees who operate with external influence. External parties can range from competitors to criminal networks and nation-states. Their primary objective is stealing and leaking confidential business information and analysis reports.

Careless

As the name suggests, careless insider threats inadvertently end up damaging their own company. Reasons generally include poor judgment, human error, phishing, aiding and abetting, stolen or lost credentials, access cards and malware.

Simply clicking insecure links or emails can expose systems to malware that penetrates the network. These threats consist of two types:

Goof

Goofs are arrogant or ignorant employees who, despite having no harmful intentions, consider themselves exempt from security risks. They open risky links, keep resources and data unsecured and bypass security SOPs.

According to Ponemon Institute’s 2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report, negligent users cause 62% of insider attacks.

Pawn

Techniques like social engineering or spear phishing manipulate pawns to perform malicious actions. They unintentionally harm the company by verbally disclosing confidential information or installing infected software.

Mole

Moles are third-party members who can gain special access to a company’s security system and exploit sensitive information. They are generally third-party vendors, contractors or support staff with sources inside the organization.

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How Do Fraudsters Attack?

Fraudsters primarily depend on goofs and pawns to access secured files. They use watering holes, weaponized malware and phishing emails to breach your security infrastructure.

They also use C2 (command and control) servers to intercept outbound communication and steal data. Their modus operandi typically is:

• Finding Vulnerabilities: Threat actors first identify rogue users and compromised credentials.
• Exploiting Access: Then they use those vulnerabilities to escalate privileges, access assets and proceed to the target.
• Abusing Privilege: Fraudsters can also abuse their privileges by altering and exfiltrating data and obfuscating system activity.

Threat Indicators

Unusual activities on the network often indicate insider threat attempts. Employees attempting to access data beyond their clearance level or showing resentment can also be signs of an attack.

You can track the following three indicators to know whether your systems are safe from insider threats:

Unscheduled Sign-Ins

Employees trying to sign in outside office hours can be a sign of data theft or malicious activity.

Larger-Than-Expected Traffic

Your company must have an estimate of the amount of traffic they’ll be transferring during a specific period. If there’s a significant deviation from expected traffic, it might indicate something’s wrong.

Suspicious Activities

Unusual employee behavior often warrants suspicion and may require close monitoring. For example, if an employee who has a reputation for getting along with others starts to behave differently, attend to it.

With endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, you can track and prevent suspicious activities across your network.

Monitor suspicious indicators with Trellix EDR capabilities. Source

Threat Expressions

The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines the following types of insider behavior as the manifestation of damage:

• Espionage is the illegal act of spying on a foreign government to gain information on financial, political and military strategies. It can take different forms, including economic espionage involving financial trade secrets, government espionage involving political and military advantage and criminal espionage revealing U.S. government secrets to foreign nationals.
• Workplace violence is when attackers act violently with other employees due to past grudges or personal issues.
• Theft and sabotage are the two main reasons for insider attacks. Theft involves the stealing of intellectual property or money, and sabotage means intentional attempts to harm an organization’s physical or virtual infrastructure.

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Detection Methods

Detection is the first and foremost step in protecting your company against insider threats. Apart from identifying suspicious activities, you also need to detect opportunities that employees might exploit to target your confidential data.

You can follow these steps to prevent your employees from being motivated to attack your business and minimize opportunities that can lead to any damage:

• Your IT team should first segregate normal user activities from suspicious ones by establishing a normal behavioral pattern and identifying those that deviate from them.
• Closing security gaps is an important step in ensuring smooth functioning. Centralized endpoint monitoring can provide complete visibility into user activities. You can aggregate data into unified endpoint management or standalone solutions.
• You can begin detection with account changelogs, authentication and access and move on to broader scopes like endpoint logs and VPNs for advanced threats.
• Privileged access management can provide visibility into privileged accounts and forward data to SIEM platforms. SOC teams can analyze this data to assign risk scores and monitor threat situations across the network.
• User-focused monitoring can also help detect behavioral anomalies. With behavioral analytics, you can identify suspicious user logins from unusual times of the day or multiple wrong password attempts. Security officers can assess if an insider has become a threat actor or if an external agent has compromised company credentials.
• Integrating machine learning into your EDR solutions lets you determine the priority of alerts. You can use digital and behavioral forensic tools to analyze, detect and get alerts about potential threats.

Preventive Best Practices

Now that you know everything about insider threats, their types, expressions and detection methods, let’s talk about the last but most crucial aspect of prevention.

What can you do to minimize the risk of insider threats? Here’s a guide on the best practices you can implement to safeguard your confidential data.

Enforce Strict Policies and Controls

Every security solution that you implement should have a clearly defined configuration document and management policy. You must collaborate with HR and security departments to create and implement policies for every employee transaction.

Establish policies for threat response, account management, third party access, password management, inventory management and user monitoring.

Implement Security Solutions

You must deploy appropriate security software to properly monitor, analyze, detect and prevent insider threats. Some examples include endpoint security software, intrusion detection, traffic monitoring, encryption solutions, data loss prevention, spam filter, EDR solutions and intrusion prevention systems.

Ensure Robust Workspace Security

Deploy a professional security team to properly install all checks and balances in the physical workspace. You can prevent suspicious employees from entering or accessing critical IT areas like servers and switch rack rooms. Direct the security team to conduct inspections at entrances and always lock server rooms when not in use.

Define Cloud Security Arrangements

Along with several benefits, cloud services have some limitations as well. Service providers often extend your network perimeters, making it vulnerable to insider threats. 53% of organizations feel that detecting insider threats in the cloud is harder.

To secure the cloud, you can conduct risk assessment tests on the data you’re about to share. Make sure that vendors meet your company’s security standards and requirements. Also, remember to control and constantly monitor every change made in the cloud in order to quickly locate incidents.

Implement Strong Passwords

Make sure all your employees have properly configured key cards to access crucial areas. Implement systems that require a valid and customized password and provide each employee with a unique combination.

It’s important to implement proper checks and balances, as well as separation of duties, to prevent any single user from having unrestricted access to sensitive company information. Giving excessive privileges to users, whether in administrative or non-administrative roles, can lead to potential security breaches or misuse of company resources.

Respond Promptly and Efficiently

While identifying or detecting insider threats is important, it’s not enough to protect your business from harm. It’s crucial to have an effective alert system in place that enables your security teams to quickly respond and intervene when necessary.

A timely response can prevent attackers from accessing more sensitive documents and causing further damage, while also making it easier to prevent similar incidents in the future.

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Next Steps

Traditional security systems like firewalls, antivirus and intrusion detection often overlook insider threats, making them harder to detect. Furthermore, addressing such threats becomes challenging as attackers rarely leave traces or evidence behind for security teams to track.

To safeguard your organization against insider threats, you can implement efficient security software. You can start by creating a list of your business-specific needs using our requirements template. Make sure to check out our free comparison guide to compare top security systems.

What kind of insider threats have you faced? Which other best practices do you think are effective against such threats? Do let us know in the comments below!