Limit your exposure to insider threats

While everyone is worried about North Korea, the NSA, and other external third-party threats, the biggest threat to network resources and sensitive data is still the people you trust most. Employees with access to information pose a significant risk–whether it’s inadvertent or with malicious intent.

You still have to make sure you’re employing security best practices to guard against external threats, but organizations need to take additional precautions to protect against individuals inside the company compromising the network, or exposing confidential data.

I wrote a post outlining some ways to limit exposure to insider threats:

Target, Home Depot, Michael’s, Dairy Queen, Sony…the list of major data breaches that have occurred over the last year or two is extensive. While most—if not all—of those attacks were a function of external hackers penetrating the network, authorized users inside the network still pose a more substantial threat.

The fact is that where the rubber meets the road so to speak, most attacks are “insider attacks”. In many of the data breaches cited above, an external hacker was responsible but the attack succeeded because the hacker was able to obtain or compromise valid network credentials. In other words, from the perspective of the company or the network, they were essentially insider attacks.

CoSoSys, a provider of endpoint security solutions, recently surveyed its clients (all with an average of 500 computers) and found that 40 percent of potential customers would not do business with a company that suffered a recent data breach.

A data breach has serious consequences both directly and indirectly. Lost revenue, and a tarnished brand reputation both inflict harm long after the actual incident is resolved and the breach has been cleaned up. Still, many organizations don’t take necessary steps to protect themselves from a potentially detrimental breach.

Read the full post at CSOOnline: 5 things you can do to limit your exposure to insider threats.