Insider Threats - the Danger from Within | Antivirus

When it comes to cyber threats, we usually talk about criminals who attack companies, but also private individuals. Your goal is to make money illegally. Another risk factor is threats that arise from negligent or malicious behavior on the part of your own employees.

According to the study " Insider Threat 2018 Report ", the greatest risk factors include the excessive number of users with excessive access rights, an increasing number of devices with access to sensitive data and the constantly increasing complexity of IT.

According to In the above study, two-thirds of companies consider malicious or accidental insider attacks to be more likely than external attacks. This should be true if the unwanted support of cybercriminals by internal parties is included. For criminals, employees are therefore one of the keys to money. They often use social engineering to motivate internal people, but also partners, to unconsciously bypass protective measures.

What Actually Is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is the art of getting someone to voluntarily do things that he or she does not want or should not do. In short, the art of hacking the human operating system. To this end, human characteristics and trained, socially recognized behaviors are used. For example, an attacker can take advantage of the willingness to help a supplier with a heavy package by disguising himself as a supplier and claiming that he has to hand over the package personally.

A possible situation could play out as follows: Shortly before the end of the working day, an employee is called from the supposed IT service desk. After work, all devices are set up again and the system administrator needs the login information to back up private content. The next morning you can log in again with the existing password and then change the password for security reasons.
With a little pressure to be able to enjoy the evening soon, the prospect of good service, and a friendly voice, the fake service desk employee leads the user to reveal their password. After all, you don't want to lose any data. Further examples are grandchildren fraud or attacks with phishing emails.

How Can You Protect Yourself?

Good business processes, for example, help against internal perpetrators who, be it out of revenge against the employer or for any other reason, are aware of stealing business secrets, with appropriate controls, separation of functions and authorization management that restricts access to data according to the need-to-know principle, a lot has already been done.

As a rule, employees have no bad intentions against their own company. Internal cyber threats can also arise through unintentional but negligent behavior. There are various measures to protect yourself against externally motivated internal people. Probably the most important thing is that employees, partners, suppliers, and customers are aware of the threats and know how to react to them. Additional protection is provided by technical measures such as sandboxes for testing email attachments or isolated web browsers for secure surfing. Ideally, various protective measures are combined in such a way that they protect the company's crown jewels like onion skins.

Multifactor Authentication

Especially for web services, multifactor authentication offers an inexpensive and effective protective measure. It combines two or more independent proofs of authorization to access a system:

- What does the user know? -> Password, security questions

- What does the user have? -> Security token, e.g. security card, pin via SMS

- What is the user? -> biometric verification, e.g. fingerprint, iris scan

This multilayered hurdle makes it more difficult for attackers to gain unauthorized access to a system and to gain access to a company's valuable information.

Raising Employee Awareness

As a preventive measure, raising employee awareness will play an increasingly important role in the future. The first frame networkers offer various training and workshops on these topics. The priority is on the use of antivirus. On the one hand, we offer security awareness training, for example, in which employees learn to recognize dangers and to protect their IT resources accordingly. Automated attack simulation with subsequent online training also sensitizes employees. We also help customers to issue binding security guidelines or provide external information security officers.