There’s a lot written about the wide range of external security threats to your business, but what about internal security threats? Do they exist?
Yes, they most certainly do! Your staff – or insiders as they’re known – pose the biggest security risk going for your business. Whilst there can be malicious intent on the part of insiders, the threat is more likely to come from an innocent mistake.
It’s crucial, therefore, that your business doesn’t allocate all its security energies purely on external risks. Instead, you need to make sure that there’s a well maintained program for monitoring the activities of your staff as well as educating them.
In order to understand these security threats and minimize their chances of occurring, I’m going to discuss the security phenomena of insiders.
Who Is an Insider?
The most important thing to note about insiders is that they’re not necessarily drawn exclusively from your pool of employees. What actually defines an individual’s status as an insider is whether they have access to your systems and data.
Now, whilst this immediately points towards your employees, it also indicates that the following individuals can be considered insiders:
- Contractors such as IT teams and cloud suppliers
- External auditors
- Visiting customers accessing your Wi-Fi connection
Naturally, this opens up your businesses data to a large number of insiders who can pass easily in and out of your system.
What Risks Does an Insider Pose?
Once an insider has access to your system there is a potentially huge list of activities they could carry out to breach your security and leave your data in a precarious position.
The actual nature of these breaches may seem relatively crude and simple, but they can have a particularly devastating effect. Say, for example, you keep a monthly spreadsheet of all your dealings with clients, wouldn’t it be an absolute nightmare if it fell into your competitors’ hands?
With a malicious insider at work this nightmare could soon become a reality with just one email attachment.
Of course, there still remain more sophisticated security breaches that can be instigated by an insider. Malware can be installed through USB sticks which can leave your network at the mercy of trojan horses, ransomware and potentially crippling system crashes.
And we can’t forget the good old fashioned carelessness of human error. It’s very easy for a naive employee to fall for an email scam and disclose sensitive details such as logon names and passwords, so this remains a major security risk.
Tackling the Threat of Insiders
Thankfully, businesses aren’t helpless in the face of insider security threats. In fact, they’re some of the simplest security breaches to prevent. Let’s take a look at what you can do:
- Monitor abnormal behavior of employees such as accessing data and areas of the network not associated with their job role
- Impose a strict level of access to third parties working on your network and ensure their activity can be monitored
- Allocate access permissions based on employee roles in the organization to minimize the number of people accessing secure data
- Prevent the usage of unauthorized external devices on your network e.g. employee’s personal USB sticks
Keeping the Insiders Out?
Now, it may seem as though this article points the fingers at your employees and third parties whilst screaming “DANGER!” but this isn’t the case! What I want to do is make you aware of how important it is to protect your business from all angles. The threat may come externally or it may come internally, but either way a threat is a threat and it’s crucial you counter all of them.
For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.
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