What Is an Insider Threat | Malicious Insider Attack Examples | Imperva (2024)

What Is an Insider Threat

An insider threat is a security risk that originates from within the targeted organization. It typically involves a current or former employee or business associate who has access to sensitive information or privileged accounts within the network of an organization, and who misuses this access.

Traditional security measures tend to focus on external threats and are not always capable of identifying an internal threat emanating from inside the organization.

Types of insider threats include:

  • Malicious insider—also known as a Turncloak, someone who maliciously and intentionally abuses legitimate credentials, typically to steal information for financial or personal incentives. For example, an individual who holds a grudge against a former employer, or an opportunistic employee who sells secret information to a competitor. Turncloaks have an advantage over other attackers because they are familiar with the security policies and procedures of an organization, as well as its vulnerabilities.
  • Careless insider—an innocent pawn who unknowingly exposes the system to outside threats. This is the most common type of insider threat, resulting from mistakes, such as leaving a device exposed or falling victim to a scam. For example, an employee who intends no harm may click on an insecure link, infecting the system with malware.
  • A mole—an imposter who is technically an outsider but has managed to gain insider access to a privileged network. This is someone from outside the organization who poses as an employee or partner.

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Three types of risky behavior explained

Malicious Insider Threat Indicators

Anomalous activity at the network level could indicate an inside threat. Likewise, if an employee appears to be dissatisfied or holds a grudge, or if an employee starts to take on more tasks with excessive enthusiasm, this could be an indication of foul play. Trackable insider threat indicators include:

  • Activity at unusual times—signing in to the network at 3 am
  • The volume of traffic—transferring too much data via the network
  • The type of activity—accessing unusual resources

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How To Protect Against an Insider Attack: Best Practices

You can take the following steps to help reduce the risk of insider threats:

  • Protect critical assets—these can be physical or logical, including systems, technology, facilities, and people. Intellectual property, including customer data for vendors, proprietary software, schematics, and internal manufacturing processes, are also critical assets. Form a comprehensive understanding of your critical assets. Ask questions such as: What critical assets do we possess? Can we prioritize our assets? And, What do we understand about the current state of each asset?
  • Enforce policies—clearly document organizational policies so you can enforce them and prevent misunderstandings. Everyone in the organization should be familiar with security procedures and should understand their rights in relation to intellectual property (IP) so they don’t share privileged content that they have created.
  • Increase visibility—deploy solutions to keep track of employee actions and correlate information from multiple data sources. For example, you can use deception technology to lure a malicious insider or imposter and gain visibility into their actions.
  • Promote culture changes—ensuring security is not only about know-how but also about attitudes and beliefs. To combat negligence and address the drivers of malicious behavior, you should educate your employees regarding security issues and work to improve employee satisfaction.

Insider Threat Detection Solutions

Insider threats can be harder to identify or prevent than outside attacks, and they are invisible to traditional security solutions like firewalls and intrusion detection systems, which focus on external threats. If an attacker exploits an authorized login, the security mechanisms in place may not identify the abnormal behavior. Moreover, malicious insiders can more easily avoid detection if they are familiar with the security measures of an organization.

To protect all your assets, you should diversify your insider threat detection strategy, instead of relying on a single solution. An effective insider threat detection system combines several tools to not only monitor insider behavior, but also filter through the large number of alerts and eliminate false positives.

Tools like Machine Learning (ML) applications can help analyze the data stream and prioritize the most relevant alerts. You can use digital forensics and analytics tools like User and Event Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to help detect, analyze, and alert the security team to any potential insider threats. User behavior analytics can establish a baseline for normal data access activity, while database activity monitoring can help identify policy violations.

See how Imperva Data Risk Analytics can help you with insider threats.

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How Imperva Protects Against Insider Threats

Imperva recognizes that user behavior analysis is key to protecting against insider threats, but is not enough. We provide a stack of solutions that not only monitors how users move through the network, but also protects assets on a data level, ensuring that whatever a malicious insider touches, you are in control.

Imperva’s industry-leading data security solution protects your data wherever it lives—on premises, in the cloud and in hybrid environments. It also provides security and IT teams with full visibility into how the data is being accessed, used, and moved around the organization.

Our comprehensive approach relies on multiple layers of protection, including:

  • Database firewall—blocks SQL injection and other threats, while evaluating for known vulnerabilities.
  • User rights management—monitors data access and activities of privileged users to identify excessive, inappropriate, and unused privileges.
  • Data masking and encryption—obfuscate sensitive data so it would be useless to the bad actor, even if somehow extracted.
  • Data loss prevention (DLP)—inspects data in motion, at rest on servers, in cloud storage, or on endpoint devices.
  • User behavior analytics—establishes baselines of data access behavior, uses machine learning to detect and alert on abnormal and potentially risky activity.
  • Data discovery and data classification—reveals the location, volume, and context of data on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Database activity monitoring—monitors relational databases, data warehouses, big data and mainframes to generate real-time alerts on policy violations.
  • Alert prioritization—Imperva uses AI and machine learning technology to look across the stream of security events and prioritize the ones that matter most.
What Is an Insider Threat | Malicious Insider Attack Examples | Imperva (2024)

FAQs

What Is an Insider Threat | Malicious Insider Attack Examples | Imperva? ›

It occurs when your employees, contractors, or business partners misuse their access intentionally or unintentionally, harming your networks, systems, and data. Insider threats may manifest in different ways including negligence, data theft, system sabotage, fraud, and cyber attacks.

What is an example of an insider threat? ›

Examples include mistyping an email address and accidentally sending a sensitive business document to a competitor, unknowingly or inadvertently clicking on a hyperlink, opening an attachment in a phishing email that contains a virus, or improperly disposing of sensitive documents.

What is an insider attack? ›

An insider attack is launched by an internal user who may be authorized to use the system that is attacked. An insider attack may be intentional or accidental. Insider attackers range from poorly trained administrators who make mistakes to malicious individuals who intentionally compromise the security of systems.

What best describes an insider threat? ›

An insider threat is anyone with authorized access who uses that access to wittingly or unwittingly cause harm to an organization and its resources including information, personnel, and facilities.

What is insider threat or insider risk? ›

There is an insider risk when an employee downloads sensitive data to a personal device. That risk becomes an insider threat when the employee decides to sell the sensitive data, potentially causing reputational harm or putting the organization at a competitive disadvantage.

What is an insider threat in Quizlet? ›

An insider threat is anyone with authorized access to the information or things an organization values most, and who uses that access, either wittingly or unwittingly, to inflict harm to the organization or national security.

What is a insider explain and give example? ›

a person who is a member of a group, organization, society, etc. a person belonging to a limited circle of persons who understand the actual facts in a situation or share private knowledge: Insiders knew that the president would veto the bill. a person who has some special advantage or influence.

What is an example of an indirect threat? ›

Indirect Threat An indirect threat is vague, unclear, and ambiguous. The plan, the motivation, intended victim and other aspects of the threat are masked. “If I wanted to, I could kill everyone at this school!” While violence is implied the threat is phrased tentatively and suggests that it could occur.

How many types of insider threats are there? ›

The CISA defines two types of insider threats: intentional and unintentional. They can both cause significant harm to a network despite their differences in intent and execution.

What are the four types of threats? ›

Threats can be classified in four categories: direct, indirect, veiled, or conditional.

What is the meaning of insider threat? ›

An insider threat refers to a cyber security risk that originates from within an organization. It typically occurs when a current or former employee, contractor, vendor or partner with legitimate user credentials misuses their access to the detriment of the organization's networks, systems and data.

What are the indicators of insider threat? ›

Here is what to watch out for as a leading indicator for an insider threat event: An employee who normally gets along with other employees starts behaving differently. Unexplained poor performance and disinterest in work. Disagreements with superiors or coworkers over policies.

Which scenario might indicate an insider threat? ›

Look for employees accessing sensitive information during non-business hours, repeated access to irrelevant data, or unusual patterns that deviate from their normal job functions.

What is the difference between insider threat and trusted insider? ›

Trusted insiders may deliberately or unknowingly help others to obtain chemicals of security concern for terrorist purposes. Insider threats can be difficult to predict or detect. On their own, indicators of suspicious activity may not warrant action, but together they could indicate a threat.

What are insider threat measures? ›

To prevent insider threat attacks, organizations should implement automated data wiping, initiated once employees leave the organization. Typically, Active Directories of former employees are deleted when they leave. However, not all organizations remember to wipe the data employees stored on their own devices.

Which of the following is true about insider threats? ›

The true statement about insider threats is that they can include employees, former employees, consultants, and anyone with access to an organization's systems. Not restricted to intentional acts, these threats can come from users who may not even be aware that they are causing harm.

What is included in insider threat? ›

Also referred to as a turn-cloak, the principal goals of malicious insider threats include espionage, fraud, intellectual property theft and sabotage. They intentionally abuse their privileged access to steal information or degrade systems for financial, personal and/or malicious reasons.

Which scenario is an example of a reportable insider threat? ›

Final answer: The scenario that could be a reportable insider threat is an employee accessing personal emails during lunch break. Personal emails can be a source of potential security risks if proper cyber hygiene is not practiced.

What are examples of a threat? ›

Threatening behavior, including but not limited to: Physical actions that demonstrate anger, such as moving closer aggressively, waving arms or fists, or yelling in an aggressive or threatening manner; extreme mood swings. Verbal abuse, swearing.

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