Insider threats are destructive. Fortunately, there are techniques you can deploy for detecting and mitigating those. One of the essential techniques is through an effective monitoring in real-time using insider threat software.
A monitoring system could be in the form of an event log analyzer where it can monitor internal user activity and report any suspicious activities that may lead to internal attacks. The monitoring application would also help IT security professionals to track specific and critical events in real time thus provide capabilities to establish baseline parameters and pinpoint potential internal malicious activity.
How to maximize your monitoring system
To maximize the benefit of such monitoring mechanism, a business organization needs to establish meaningful security policies to determine what needs to be monitored and at what levels of system architecture. What are they?
1. Do log analysis
Data collected from various security devices may need to be further analyzed to aid in detecting any insider misuse given the fact that some sensitive information system encrypts their critical data and therefore its necessary to conduct through log analysis before attempting to identify and detect malicious insiders.
2. Monitor privileged users
Another defensive approach would be to be cautious with privileged users such as system administrators and IT managers; privileged employees are not only aware of loosely enforced company’s policies and procedures but they are also aware of system’s security flaws and know how to exploit those flaws to commit malicious actions.
Therefore, business organizations need to pay additional attention to those advantageous individuals, this could be by establishing technical controls to log, monitor, and audit their online actions in addition to enforcing proactive and strict security measures following their termination such as account termination and ensuring that their access to any information resources is disabled.
3. Conduct vulnerability assessment
Conducting insider threats vulnerability assessment is also a good security strategy to protect organizations against malicious insiders; companies need to implement vulnerability assessment measures to understand how vulnerable they are to insider risks and develop mitigation techniques based on the assessment. It’s also important for organizations to incorporate vulnerability assessment plans into a wide enterprise risk assessment strategy and identify the most critical information resources against both insiders and outsiders.
4. Security policies and procedures communication and socialization
Another non-technical defensive measure would be by enforcing and clearly communicating security policies and procedures to employees at all levels of the organization. Malicious insiders are usually on the lookout to exploit any gaps in security policies and guidelines, therefore companies should address this risk by consistently and strictly enforcing technical and organizational policies. This proactive security technique is likely to prevent any data modification or leakage by disgruntled employees or employees who are not happy with their compensation and benefits.
Conclusion
Business organizations with effective security controls will be better able to mitigate suspicious employee behaviors and ultimately minimize the risk and impact of information theft and insider IT sabotage.