Safeguarding Information Resources from Insider Threats

Insider threats have been around for a long time and if one were to trace them back to the earlier civilization’s, it was in 1800s that the first batch of computers suffered an attack at the hand of malicious insiders. Invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard of France, it was essentially an automatic loom that ended up boring the brunt of an attack launched by malicious elements.

Two insider variables working against you

There are two insider variables which seem to be working against an employee big time:

·         Firstly, Trust &

·         Secondly, Legitimate Access  

The first instance allows malicious insiders to conduct espionage, steal sensitive data, and sabotage assets quickly, easily and with a greater degree of stealth than an external attacker. Careless and negligent insiders pose a similar threat, even if their intentions wouldn’t be considered to be nefarious. Something one could end up carrying out accidently or with purpose; leading to ramifications fraught with adverse consequences. And additionally from there on an investigation into the insider activity would enable one to ascertain whether the same act was carried out with a malicious intent.

Best Practices Considerations

·         Monitoring every user’s interaction with information

·    Ensuring high-end accountability irrespective of an endpoint gadget in question i.e. it does not matter whether a device in question is a laptop, desktop, tablet, or a smart phone

·   Protecting clients from careless activity related to accidental sharing, posting, and   uploading of information as well as any activity related to lost or stolen laptops and USB thumb drives

·         Employing varying controls across all information states—at rest, in motion, and in use

·         Aggregating controls across endpoint, network, and data for holistic visibility

·       Centralizing security control management for rapid incident identification, analysis, and response

While at the end of the day, human analysis would be essential to protect information from insiders, it is impossible to know if individuals responsible are indeed supported with the right type of security controls. And in such a scenario no black box can be plugged into a network that will mitigate all careless and malicious insider activity. However, then again there are sets of controls which when leveraged collectively could provide strong incident detection, protection and response capabilities across all endpoints, networks, data as and when the requirement be. www.pccare247.com

How to make online criminals bite the dust?

Geeks, Freaks, Nerds and Weirdos are terms one would associate with a person boasting of an exceptionally high IQ quotient. Sadly, the same qualities would also describe hackers looking to exploit any cyber threat; be it a data breach in a network, data leakage by employees, or extracting data from a lost laptop or a mobile device.

Watch Out!! You may be in line next

With diversity of security attacks recording an unexceptional high across the globe, it is becoming an uphill task for small and medium-sized businesses to assemble the right in-house resources for protecting themselves. So, much so that there has been an uptick in the number of court cases where SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) were even robbed of six-figure amounts by cyber thieves.

Scared!! Don’t be!! For as they do say prevention is better than cure, I would recommend you to not to jump the gun and instead stick to these 8 simple credos:

• Employing a dedicated PC for financial matters related to online banking and bill pay. Refraining from using the same node for sending, receiving emails or surfing the Web. For as it goes Web exploits and Malicious E-mails are considered as two key infection vectors for malware.
• Taking care and being extra cautious while clicking on links or attachments within emails. Even if you do end up recognizing the sender, confirm the email is authentic before clicking on any links or attachments.
• Reconcile bank statements on a regular basis with an online bank account or credit-card for immediately identifying abnormal transactions indicative of an account takeover.
• Cautioning employees against visiting small, hosted websites featuring community forums related to sports, computer games and anything deemed suspicious. All because a majority of community forums are hosted by ISP’s not really serious about securing their portal.
• Put security protections in place throughout the organization and install regular updates for applications meant to boost the computer’s OS.
• While visiting a website observe the quality of the site. If the site appears to be quickly put together, lack a browsing disclaimer, it indicates the authors are not liable to any danger to the PC.
• Be cautious about installing any software (especially software such as download accelerators, spyware removal tools). Don’t click on pop ups asking for a download or execution of otherwise privileged operations. Often such software and pop-ups are malware embedded.
• Select your anti-virus vendor with a lot of due deliberation, ensuring the application not only provides coverage for key threats but also responds quickly when threats are introduced. Trial versions of the application are a strict NO! Since, viruses introduced after a trial version would end up having an unhindered access to a PC. www.pccare247.com