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Risk Management and Insider Threats

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Risk management is a term bandied about by a lot of experts. It’s critically important, of course, but it is also a catch-all for security terms that may not seem to apply directly to immediate, regulatory security. 

So, when insider threats come up, it becomes challenging to parse out how security and risk help address the issue. Here, we will discuss how simple approaches to risk management can start to address insider threats. 

 

What Is an Insider Threat?

Insider threats are security events where a party internal to your organization facilitates data theft, unauthorized system access, or other issues. This internal party can be an employee (current or former), a contractor or a vendor that works with your organization and has access to sensitive information or resources. 

An insider can literally be anyone with access to your systems. This includes any combination of the following parties:

These insider threats are within an organization. Unlike an external attack or phishing attempt that attempts to pry information from your organization, an internal threat is a problem specifically because the threat is someone the organization more or less trusts with system access. A threat may have advanced knowledge of internal systems or elevated access and privileges around organizational data. 

How significant are insider threats? Imperva and Forrester released a report showing that almost a full quarter of the most notable breaches of 2021 were related to “human error or compromised credentials.” 

Furthermore, organizations facing insider threats often report that they don’t have a plan to deal with insider threats. A full 70% of polled organizations in the report state they don’t have an insider threat risk strategy. 

 

How Does Risk Play a Role in Identifying Insider Threats?

According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), organizations must manage insider threats as part of their security obligations. While CISA primarily refers to contractors working with government agencies, it isn’t incorrect to say that in a world of interconnected industrial systems and wide-ranging industrial espionage, risk assessment isn’t a necessary part of security for most organizations. 

Risk assessment is a critical part of mitigating insider threats, specifically because insider threats are often difficult to locate. Unlike technical security flaws where gaps can be identified, cataloged, mitigated and monitored, insider threats are often insidious and difficult to follow because they deal with complex human factors. 

More importantly, risk management can give your organization a comprehensive view of the potential threat landscape related to insiders. That’s because insider threats can come from several angles: 

 

People Factors

The most common warning signs of insider threats are related to personal actions that often fly under the radar. 

Some common patterns that can denote the potential for insider threats related to individual actions include:

 

Technical Factors

Insider threats can be limited to the personnel, but these workers will often need to implement technical measures to support their activities. As such, measuring these technical issues can help denote the presence of an underlying insider threat. 

Some of these issues include:

 

How Can an Organization Manage Insider Threats?

There are a few ways in which risk management can help your organization better understand the risk of insider threats. Still, it requires an honest and comprehensive look at the potentially affected systems. 

Some basic approaches to implementing risk management as part of an insider threat policy include some of the following:

 

Risk Management and Security with Continuum GRC

The best way to approach risk management is to incorporate it into your overall infrastructure. Risk mitigation for insider threats should be able to touch on multiple infrastructural assets to compare existing technical controls, activity audits, personnel, and performance issues against security and compliance requirements. 

If you’re interested in a standards-based approach to risk with supportive visualization technologies and a bird’s-eye view of your situation, work with Continuum GRC. 

Continuum GRC is proactive cyber security®. Call 1-888-896-6207 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization protect its systems and ensure compliance.

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