Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Detecting malicious activity takes weeks or even months despite the many efforts companies put into building cybersecurity threat detection systems. You can increase your chances of uncovering malicious activity by studying insider threat techniques and applying diverse detection methods. In this article, we discuss the most common techniques behind insider threats and their possible indicators as well as ways you can detect insider threats in an efficient manner.

Proper implementation of a user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) tool can solve lots of cybersecurity challenges by detecting well-hidden and slowly executed attacks, automating the analysis of alerts and logs, and speeding up incident investigation. It can even help you improve employee productivity. But implementing a UEBA solution also requires a lot of time and effort along with a clear understanding of how you are going to use it.

Protecting your sensitive data and other critical assets requires establishing secure access to them in the first place. Lots of organizations do this by protecting their remote servers and corporate systems with SSH keys. However, even SSH keys can be compromised and abused by malicious actors. In this article, we talk about SSH keys and their role in secure authentication processes as well as about the benefits of effective SSH key management.

Departing employees are a source of insider threats that often get overlooked. According to a study by Biscom, one in four departing employees steal data when leaving. Whether they do so out of negligence or with malicious intent, such cases can only have negative outcomes for organizations, from losing their competitive advantage to facing penalties for non-compliance with cybersecurity requirements.

When presented with an opportunity, people who never even planned to attack your organization may turn into a severe cybersecurity threat. Forget to block a dismissed employee from accessing your system and they may steal or alter your critical data. Grant a third-party contractor excessive access to your infrastructure and they may cause a serious data breach. That’s why it’s crucial to make sure you don’t give insiders an opportunity to turn malicious.

Using unapproved tools, software, and devices is risky. You never know what vulnerabilities so-called shadow IT may have. The pandemic that began in 2020 put a new spin on the shadow IT problem. The sudden need to handle all processes remotely was a true challenge, since the majority of corporate networks were not configured to be safely accessed by employees from home.

For any organization, insider attacks are like a severe illness: prevention is better than the cure. Like illnesses, insiders mask their malicious actions and can harm your organization for a long time before you detect them. This harm can be in the form of a loss of data, customers, money, etc.   Planning a risk mitigation process helps to stop insider attacks at the early stages or reduce their potential damage.

Securing an organization’s sensitive data is hard, especially when the danger comes from within. A careless coworker may insecurely share credentials, an intruder may compromise an account, or a malicious insider may misuse their access rights. According to the 2020 Cost of Insider Threats Report [PDF] by IBM, 60% of organizations experienced more than 20 insider-related incidents in 2019. One promising solution to prevent insider threats is user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).

While organizations are spending a good deal of money protecting their data against unauthorized access from the outside, malicious insiders may pose no less harm. According to the 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report [PDF] by Verizon, 36% of all data breaches experienced by large organizations in 2020 were caused by internal actors. For small and midsize businesses, it was 44%.