Insider Threats: Some Ways Of Detection and Prevention

The leading cause of data breaches worldwide is insider attacks, and it is also among the most expensive. As per a recent survey, sixty-eight percent of organizations noted that insider attacks have become frequent over the last 12 months. Besides, 70 percent experienced one or more insider attacks during the same period. According to Ponemon estimates, the expected cost per insider incident in 2020 is $11.45 million, rising from 2018 by 31 percent.
While data breaches from hacking/phishing/ransomware seem to draw the most attention, most data security incidents are from trusted insiders with access to sensitive data and systems. Therefore, insider threats are one of the most prominent yet elusive dangers to deal with.
An insider could be a current or former employee, contractor, or company partner with legitimate access to the company’s network, systems, or data. The insider threat arises when their access is maliciously or unintentionally misused to adversely affect or harm the company.
Insider risks are harmful to companies using legacy ERP programs
The number one obstacle for security teams when it comes to determining an insider threat is that the users in question have legitimate access to the ERP application. It is the malicious intent or individual violation among the rest of legitimate access that makes it hard to tell the difference between a user’s regular operation and possible malicious behavior. What makes them so risky is that insiders usually know how to find and exploit sensitive data and also have a privileged account.
ERP data access and usage tracking to identify insider threats
To reduce the amount of damage the insider could do, it is important to detect an insider threat as quickly as possible. Monitoring of user activity around data access and usage can demonstrate internal access misuse and theft of credentials. And continuous monitoring of outlier and anomalous behavior patterns offers insight into how high-privilege users interact with sensitive data. This monitoring helps security teams identify a possible malicious insider or whether an external attacker has compromised an employee’s credentials. It’s a lot of work without advanced analytics and data monitoring to keep track of any user’s behavior once they’ve signed into the system.
As security teams monitor data access and usage, they can be proactively alerted to potential insider attacks by detecting anomalous activity with actionable insights into what has been accessed and by whom. Organizations can now react quickly with a complete forensic analysis and a rapid and detailed response.
Preventing insider attacks with dynamic data-centric security
Although security professionals understand the value of continuously monitoring access to and usage of data to detect insider threats, companies should also adopt a layered, data-centered security model to maximize the likelihood of preventing attacks from insider threats.
Dynamic authorization policies improve access controls
Organizations can incorporate dynamic authorization techniques that use contextually aware access controls. Dynamic authorization offers organizations a way to take advantage of contextual access characteristics such as time of day, geolocation, and IP address to better control access to resources and how and where users access them.
Expand the use of data masking
Now that insider attacks are on the rise, the use of data masking should be extended to all areas that can be considered personally identifiable, allowing you to have more control over who can see what information and when.
Enable stepped-up Multi-Factor Authentication
The incorporation of multi-factor authentication at the transaction level and the perimeter ensures that users are not only able to access and view the data but also perform the actual transaction when it comes to making transactions with sensitive information.
Conclusion
Enterprises may help their IT security teams take a clear, proactive approach to detecting and preventing insider threats and attacks by applying a data-centric security approach combined with continuous monitoring of data access and usage.