Insider Threat Prevention Part 5

Insider Threat Prevention Cyber Security (ITPCS) is scary. In the first place, ITPCS challenges the most knowledgeable people in the organization. In the second, ITPCS is disastrous when it fails. A single criminal incident can completely ruin a company and render the company completely out of business (OOB). As far as I can remember, we have always faced the challenge of Insider Threat Prevention. Cyber Security, however, is the complicating factor today.

Today, ITPCS has become a chronic problem for executives and the organizations they lead. You would probably be correct to guess that about forty percent of all Cyber Security incidents result from malicious insider attacks. Insider cyber-attacks are more expensive than the attacks of external hackers. While "credentialed" Insider attacks leave the most damage behind, the malicious insider attacks perpetrated by malicious outsiders through coercion often cause the most damage.

Here is a perennial fact: Insider Threat Prevention is fundamentally behavioral and psychological. Highly secure technology assists ITPCS, but it is not enough. ITP begins with people, moves to process, and terminates with technology, always facilitated by people. ITP is a direct attack on an organizations information resources.

Anything can be a target such as data, Intellectual Property, Trade Secrets, and Knowledge Applications. Malicious success requires Cyber Terrorists to discover where the organizations targeted information resources are located as well as the rules governing access and usage. These rules enable teams to manage data classification, access governance, data sharing, monitoring, procedures and controls, legal and cultural considerations.

The missing key to stopping malicious insiders is, of course, not hiring them and selecting them out early during the customary probationary period. Since malicious insiders can operate more silently and inflict more damage than outsiders, designated managers have to pay attention to the "lateral movement" activities of their employees as they access the information systems internally and externally.