In cybersecurity, many of the threats most commonly talked about come from external attackers. Hackers and cybercriminals are often looking for ways to enter into your systems unnoticed to access and change, steal, or otherwise compromise your data. But insider threats can cause just as much damage as outside attackers—in some cases, they may be even more dangerous.
Your Guide to Insider Threats and What to Do About Them
Insider threats should be a top priority for all organizations. Per one recent survey, a majority of cybersecurity professionals are concerned about insider threats. This is because insider attacks are becoming more frequent, they’re particularly difficult to respond to, and they may be harder to detect in an increasingly cloud-dependent environment.
To understand the problem and how to solve it, there are three primary areas to cover:
- An overview of what insider threats are and how to spot them
- A guide to mitigating insider threats and attacks as they appear
- Some tips for insider threat prevention, making attacks less likely
And, of course, preventing these and any other kinds of threats is easier with help. Working with a security program advisor will help you identify, mitigate, and prevent insider threats.
What is an Insider Threat? Causes and Indicators
Insider threats are cybersecurity threats that come from or are related to “insiders,” or people that have some kind of special knowledge or privileged access to your IT environment. The first thing to understand about these threats is who the attackers are and what motivates them.
Insiders are people within your organization or closely connected to it (i.e., contractors or partners) who intentionally or unintentionally compromise your system.
Intentional attacks typically involve begrudged current or former employees. They feel they have been wronged by the organization and seek out ways to harm the organization in return. They may work independently or seek out cybercriminals—or be recruited by them. For intentional threats, the biggest insider threat indicators to look for are outward displays of frustration, particularly amongst staff with technical knowledge or access to sensitive systems.
Unintentional threats involve insiders making mistakes or missing precautions, accidentally or due to negligence, that expose systems to attack. These are less sinister but no less dangerous. Warning signs include poor security literacy and vigilance.
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Biggest Vulnerabilities Targeted by Insider Threats
IT and security ecosystems are vast. Even the most well-defended systems will likely have portions that are relatively less secure. Insider threats tend to pinpoint these weaknesses.
Some vulnerabilities that insider threats are particularly apt for targeting include:
- Access to sensitive information – Regulated information or trade secrets could cause harm to your organization if used or disclosed inappropriately, including by insiders.
- Weak or missing defenses – Knowing that your organization uses legacy programs (or which protections are unpatched) can make an attack both likelier and more dangerous.
- Likelihood of human error – Likewise, knowledge of gaps in security literacy and wherewithal across your staff makes it easier for insiders or outsiders to exploit them.
- Third-party risk factors – Vendors and third parties who have access to your systems can be attackers or conduits for attacks, while also being significantly harder to monitor.
These are not the only targets for insider attacks. Especially in the case of collusive threats, where a motivated insider works with an external attacker, your entire environment is at risk.
How to Mitigate Insider Threats and Related Attacks
Mitigating insider threats is the practice of minimizing the amount of damage they can do to your organization. This means accounting for the fact that threats will exist, and attacks may happen.
The first approach to mitigating insider attacks involves monitoring for and detecting them as swiftly as possible. To do so, you’ll need to establish surveillance systems to scan for and identify threats, along with appropriate controls to eliminate them.
Then, you need to deploy effective remediation controls. At a baseline, these should isolate and eliminate the threat. But ideally, your incident management program should also account for business continuity and recovery.
Note that mitigation is distinct from prevention. However, these and all other mitigation practices work best when the risk factors leading to attacks are minimized (see below).
Managed Detection and Response for Insider Threats
Mitigating insider attacks and threats requires monitoring for and detecting them swiftly to set your response in motion as soon as possible. You need to assume an active posture, hunting for early indicators of threats and attacks.
One effective approach is managed detection and response (MDR), which comprises:
- Threat Detection – Vulnerability scanners continuously monitor for indicators of insider attacks or threats, such as outward displays of frustration or negligent security practices.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA) – Experts closely examine identified threats to determine whether they resulted from gaps in security architecture or employee engagement.
- Incident Response – Response teams strategize and deploy remediation strategies to eliminate any threat or attack as soon as it is identified, minimizing spread and damage.
- Regulatory Compliance – Advisors and assessors ensure all applicable regulations are met to maintain compliance before, during, and after an insider attack is mitigated.
As an added benefit, outsourcing management of these areas reduces risks related to conflicts of interest and inter-office dynamics. For example, RCA has the potential to uncover causes and indicators of insider threats that would be in certain parties’ best interest to obscure. Outside experts lack these ulterior motives, making MDR and overall mitigation more effective.
Overall, the purpose of insider threat prevention and detection programs is to reduce the harm that threats or actualized attacks can cause by identifying and responding to them earlier.
Optimizing Incident Management for Insider Threats
Incident management is a holistic approach to the response to, eradication of, and recovery from attacks. It involves an open-ended set of processes that feed into and off of each other, generating and using threat intelligence to combat present and future incidents.
Effective incident management is a six-step process:
- Incident identification – Insider attacks should be identified swiftly to notify security teams and begin processes like quarantining and backups as soon as possible.
- Immediate and ongoing logging – Insider attacks and all activities and behaviors associated with them need to be logged for analysis over the short and long term.
- Investigation and diagnosis – All assets impacted by an attack and any activities associated with the attack itself need to be analyzed to determine a course of action.
- Assignment and escalation – Protocols for stopping the spread of the attack and removing it from your systems completely are to be deployed and adjusted as needed.
- Resolution and closure – All remediation tactics should be carried out until the threat is eliminated entirely, including any secondary vulnerabilities opened up by the attackers.
- Customer satisfaction – During and after the attack, business continuity and PR efforts ensure customer satisfaction and minimize reputational harm among staff and clientele.
Building on this comprehensive solution, incident management and insider attack mitigation works best when paired with a holistic insider threat prevention program.
How to Reduce the Risk of Insider Threats
Insider threat prevention is focused on reducing the likelihood that an insider attack damages your organization. That means minimizing the likelihood of an attack being attempted, the chance of success attackers have, and the overall impact attacks have on your system.
Effective prevention begins (and ends) with cybersecurity awareness across your staff. You need to ensure that employees know how and why to take security precautions, which threat indicators to look for, and whom to report their suspicions to.
Beyond staff awareness, ongoing threat and vulnerability management programs should be fine-tuned to indicators of internal threats. That means monitoring access, behaviors, changes, and other security-relevant phenomena for signs an insider attack is imminent.
Finally, advanced measures like penetration testing can give you the upper hand on insider threat actors by showing how they would attack so that you can prevent it.
Train Staff and Develop Insider Threat Awareness
Insider attacks come from internal people either not knowing how to protect your systems or actively choosing to compromise them. The first step to preventing both of these threat vectors is engaging employees directly with security awareness training and assessment.
Employees need to be educated on how they can keep your organization safe.
This should begin in the onboarding process, with instructional material and quizzes or other assessments to ensure they understand. But it shouldn’t end there; employees should also receive ongoing training through guided readings, webinars, and tabletop exercises to assess their skills and put them into practice at regular intervals.
These are also critical opportunities to gauge employees’ feelings about their security responsibilities and about the organization as a whole. Employees who aren’t committed to keeping your data safe may show signs of this by not taking exercises seriously or explicitly voicing their frustration. These are insider threat indicators.
Creating insider threat awareness means more than telling your staff what signs to look for and how to respond. It means cultivating a sense of urgency around these threats and motivation to take action, both preventatively and in response to an attack.
Implement Threat and Vulnerability Management
Beyond staff awareness, you should also ensure broader institutional awareness of the kinds of vulnerabilities insider attacks are likely to target. This includes the sensitivities inherently at risk of insider attack (see above), along with particular weaknesses related to other threats and risk factors specific to your organization. You need to monitor for and manage them.
Examples of threat and vulnerability management suites suited to insider threats include:
- Patch Management – You should implement regular scans for available patches and install them immediately to ensure all systems are up-to-date and operating as intended.
- Vulnerability Assessments – You should also employ continuous monitoring on assets and individuals, with notifications for unauthorized access, changes, or other events.
- Threat Intelligence Monitoring – You should compile information on past insider threats at your organization and others like it to inform prevention and mitigation.
- Cloud Security Monitoring – You should pay special attention to access points and individuals’ activity across cloud platforms, especially from remote locations.
Collectively, these programs operate in the background as a passive and complementary counterpart to active threat monitoring and detection systems, like MDR (see above).
Conduct Internal and Hybrid Penetration Testing
The most robust prevention tactics use offense to inform defense. One way you can prevent insider attacks is by simulating them and studying how the false attackers operate. This is a practice known as penetration testing.
Penetration tests come in two primary varieties: external or “black hat” tests and internal or “white hat” tests. External testing is focused on perimeter defenses and how well your system can repel attacks from the “outside.” That means seeing how long it would take an external party with no prior access to or knowledge of your systems to infiltrate them.
Internal penetration testing focuses instead on attacks that originate from a position within your systems or from some preliminary knowledge of your security infrastructure. These tests focus primarily on how attackers move once already “inside,” paying special attention to what paths and connections make it easiest for the simulated attackers to reach their targets.
Internal penetration testing provides insights into how your defenses work in practice.
Additionally, you may consider hybrid or “gray hat” penetration testing, which combines elements of internal and external tests. These exercises can help you understand how a collusive insider attack might play out if a motivated but technically unsavvy insider is recruited by or seeks out the services of an outside hacker organization.
Protect Your Organization From Insider Threats
Attacks that come from insiders, intentionally or unintentionally, can be especially damaging for an organization. Intentional insider attacks, successful or not, may speak to deeper issues of employee engagement. And unintentional insider attacks could indicate broader vulnerabilities in terms of employee awareness. In any case, these attacks may also slip under the radar, making them harder to mitigate effectively.
That’s why RSI Security is committed to helping organizations understand, deal with, and prevent these incidents. Our expert security program advisors will work with your team to optimize your defenses and minimize the threat of an insider attack.
To learn more about RSI Security’s insider threat prevention, get in touch today!