Insider Threat Detection for Safeguarding Your Business

An insider threat refers to a security vulnerability stemming from inside your organization. This usually relates to a present or past employee or business partner with access to confidential data or high-level accounts in the organization's network, who then exploits this access improperly. A non-malicious insider threat may also occur if an employee inappropriately handles data or via unauthorized access to websites or apps. This is why insider threat detection is vital for all businesses today. Simply, without it detecting insider threats is incredibly difficult.

There are multiple types of insider threats that vary based on different business environments. Here are some common insider threats examples that can be identified with insider threat monitoring:

• Unusual Behavior: Changes in an employee's behavior, such as increased defensiveness, withdrawal from team activities, or disengagement.
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• Unauthorized Access: Frequent attempts to access specific directories, or areas beyond an employee's normal job scope.
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• Unusual access to databases by privileged users: Usually, administrators have access to the critical information systems. If an administrator is found to be accessing databases in an unusual way, this may signify an insider threat.
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• Sudden interest in unauthorized websites: Unusual interest websites related to hacking tools, data exfiltration or security controls may indicate insider threat risks.
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• Negligence: Noticing repeated patterns in violating security policies, mishandling data, or showing a lack of care for the best security practices.
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• Work Hours Anomalies: Odd patterns, such as unauthorized access during off-hours or excessive data access before leaving your organization.
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• Email and Communication Anomalies: Sending sensitive information to personal email addresses or communicating with external entities beyond normal work-related communications.

You can help minimize the risk of insider attacks within your organization with insider threat software using the following principles:

• Uncover weak points and identify your most critical assets to determine what requires protection using insider threat solutions. Then adopt necessary security measures and create alerts that will notify you when your critical assets might be at potential risk.

• Clearly communicate acceptable use of company resources and guidelines for handling sensitive information to employees, vendors, and third-party partners.

• Use insider threat detection tools to monitor employees on an ongoing basis with a tool like Insightful that provides alerts and enables you to analyze digital evidence to identify any suspicious activities.
• Enforce company policies and consequences for non-compliance.

• Train your employees on an ongoing basis about the best security practices and common risks like phishing schemes and deceptive IP addresses. Share stories of actual insider threat incidents (without revealing sensitive details) to illustrate the impact.

In an increasingly digital world, we are all potentially at the risk of insider threats, which is why insider threat management is a top priority for teams today. Every organization, especially large enterprises, need to take steps to protect their data and have robust insider threat monitoring tools in place.

Privileged Access Management, like that which is provided by Insightful, helps you support insider risk management by monitoring access to critical accounts. This ensures that only authorized users have access to sensitive files and information, and allows you to see how and when it’s accessed.

Insightful helps with detecting insider threats in many ways. This includes continuous monitoring of end-user behavior to identify suspicious activity, unauthorized data access and website and app usage. Insightful also supports insider threat protection by making auditing easier and more accurate through detailed activity logs that provide digital evidence of behavior that leads to security events. Finally, user access controls enable you to shield your data by only allowing certain users access to it – then monitoring how they use this access.