Managing Insider Risks

In the latest GDS Video Snack, Sasha Qadri, Editor at MeetTheBoss TV looks at how companies can manage insider risks.

Banks are getting smarter at keeping hackers outside the organisation. But they still need to make progress on capturing what’s happening inside the business. Recent research suggests as much as 43% of data breaches occur as a direct result of internal threats. (Source: Intel)

Arie de Groot

VP Sales, EMEA, Dtex Systems:

“Risks come from users in the organizations or in the organization that want to do harm, that know they want to do harm, like stealing document, stealing databases, stealing information, going to websites they’re not supposed to do. But a lot of risks also come from users that do things without really being aware they’re doing something that’s causing a risk to the organization.”

What’s crucial to note is that for organisations, the risk is often there when they don’t expect it. So they need to look for the unexpected. There can be indications that activity is moving from normal to unusual.

Arie de Groot:

“So, for example, if, on average, the user is downloading ten documents a week or forwarding 30 documents, and we, all of a sudden, see that he is starting to download 500 or 5000 documents in 1 day, or he starts to forward things to his USB stick or to Web mail or to something much more than he used to, that is an indication where we say, “Well, that could be a potential risk.”

Here are three main recommendations for firms who want to tighten up on insider security threats.

1. Have visibility over what users are doing.
2. Baseline your user behaviour so you can accurately analyse it with baseline and behavioural analytics.
3. Train your employees so they know what they can and can’t do.

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