Defending Against Insider Threats To Reduce Your Risk

Insider threats are often overlooked when it comes to information security, but in fact insider threats account for the large majority of information theft and compromised systems. Who better to leverage their access and knowledge than those who often times have the keys to the kingdom.

I read a good white paper this morning by CA Technologies (ca.com) entitled Defending Against Insider Threats To Reduce Your Risk. You can read an excerpt here:

http://www.idpnow.net/documents/Defending_Against_Insider_Threats.pdf

The focus of the article is that insider threats are increasing. The 2009 e-Crime Watch surveyed 523 organizations and found that 51% of these organizations had experienced an insider attack, up from only 39% of organizations three years earlier. That number is probably much higher in that insider attacks often go unreported. The point is that businesses must be vigilant in looking at insider risk the same way they do external risk – perhaps even more.

The white paper goes on to talk about how insider risks manifest themselves and how these attacks are carried out, but the recommendations to reduce these risks is the important takeaway. If businesses would ensure these relatively simple “best practices” are in place, the odds of an insider attack being successful are greatly diminished.

Develop and enforce comprehensive written acceptable use policies. All organizations should have detailed acceptable use policies for all employees and should make employees review and sign the policy annually. This is a basic step but one that organizations often overlook. Having a written security policy will not necessarily prevent insider attacks, but it can still be useful for providing the entire organization with a baseline of what is acceptable usage and the proper methods for handling sensitive data.

• Ineffective management of privileged users. All IT environments have privileged users (admin, root) that have total access to key systems, applications, and information. This is not only a security risk, but it can also make compliance much more difficult. Sharing administrator passwords is another common problem which could lead to inappropriate access to your systems and information and an inability to identify specifically who performed which action on each system.

• Inappropriate role and entitlement assignment. The management of user roles and entitlements is one of the biggest challenges that many IT organizations face. Overlapping roles and duplicated or inconsistent entitlements are all common problems that can Lead to improper access to, and use of, sensitive information. In addition, the lack of automated de-provisioning can Lead to excessive entitlements or orphan accounts, both of which provide openings through which disgruntled insiders can Launch an attack.

• Poor information classification and policy enforcement. Effective protection against improper access or use of information requires strong control over user identities, access, and information use. Most organizations have some controls in these areas, but do not have a unified and robust approach to truly protect their information assets.

• Weak user authentication. Access to highly sensitive information often only requires simple password authentication, and does not take into account other contextual information (e.g., the user's location) that might raise the risk of breach.

• Poor overall identity governance. Effective protection against improper access or use of information requires strong control over user identities, access, and information use. Most organizations have some controls in these areas, but do not have a unified and robust approach to truly protect their information assets.

• Inadequate auditing and analytics. Many companies have no way to continuously audit access to help ensure that only properly authorized individuals are gaining access, and that their use of information complies with established policy. Even if they have auditing tools in place, the sheer volume of Log data generated makes it very difficult for organizations to sift through the data and identify breaches or threats.