A security breach has taken place on your network. A data leak, an intruder gains access, or critical files have been deleted… who’s to blame this time? An employee is to blame. You’ve experienced the very real and very common insider threat. How does this happen, and how do we prevent it?
Innocent
The most vulnerable part of any organization are the end-users. Users effectively determine the security posture of an organization. This posture can actually be tracked and documented with techniques such as social engineering and user knowledge base metrics, and issues with this posture can be rectified through end-user training. End user training and the correct software solution is critical in any environment to ensure users are doing their part to protect your digital assets.
How to Prevent an Innocent User from Causing a Data Breach
Web Filtering
Stop a user before they accidentally do something malicious on the web.
DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Solution
Stop data from leaving your network by means of third party storage, email, web posting, etc. Data Loss Prevention software looks for patterns in data such as SSN, credit cards, usernames, customer data, etc and stops that data from leaving your network with alerting and reporting.
User Training
Keeping users up to date on the latest threat landscape and best security practices can make a huge impact on how they view and use their workstation and company data securely.
EndPoint Protection
Keeping an eye on your digital inventory can be a daunting task. Implement endpoint protection to monitor and get reporting on information such as virus scanning, patch and update management can give you a pane of glass to view your environment and your level of security within the endpoints within the infrastructure.
Hard Disk Encryption
Users can sometimes forget their digital assets or lose them, encryption ensures that the data on mobile devices can only be accessed by your organization and no one else.
Firewalls
Stopping virus and malware from being installed can be a challenge but a firewall with proper egress rules and advanced protection can make a huge difference in your exposure to the threat landscape and what connections can be made within your organization.
Conclusion
Threats are everywhere, including internal. Many software and hardware solutions, coupled with network visibility and some training can stop malicious AND non-intentional threats from affecting your organization and the data inside.
