Preventive Measures Against Insider Attacks

Computers nowadays are most essential in businesses or in every industry we work in, but organizations have their own flaws and disadvantages. A cyberattack is a deliberate attack by someone who has sufficient knowledge of securities that’s enough to damage or steal certain data. These kinds of issues are interesting to read but the reality is that no matter the size or the scope of a breach, it’s usually caused by an action or failure of someone from the inside.

The part played by the insiders in the corporation is huge and increasing. In the Philippines, IBM found that 60% of all attacks were carried out by insiders. These attacks involved malicious intent, and the other 40% are negligent employees. They also found that health care, manufacturing, and financial services are the top three industries under attack due to their personal data, intellectual property and physical inventory, and massive financial assets. Meanwhile, industries and corporations differ substantially in the value and volume of their assets and in the technology infrastructures they have to manage and defend. What all businesses have in common is the staff all of whom have the potential to be an insider threat. Any employer would like to believe that their workers can be trusted, the sad reality of the situation is that some staff members are ready to sell company data to rival companies for personal profit. In fact, a recent study highlighted the danger many businesses face when trusting their employees with highly-sensitive information which turns out to be the main reason why attacks happen.

Though there are many employees at every company/organization that are willing to sell stolen information to other organizations, simple greed is not the only cause of internal data breaches. Oftentimes, private data can be exposed simply because an employee doesn’t know the dangers or the gravity of damage resulting from such negligence.

This is something to work on an open look at the employer-employee to enhance the relationship. It’s important to note that it isn’t at all bad. The majority of workers are good, but trustworthy people must also know how to avoid mistakes due to naivety. The company administrators do need to worry about the minority of staff members that could possibly cause a data breach for one reason or another.

Preventive Measures Against Insider Attacks

SIT DOWN

• First things first, employers need to sit down and have an honest interview/discussion with their employees about cyber security and how to avoid cyber threats. Many employees simply don’t understand the risks of plugging in unknown flash drives, and as such administrators need to have a thorough discussion that underlines what should and should not be done in the workplace.

SET LIMITATION

• The administrator of its company should limit the privileges of their employee, particularly in the USB port of each workstation which is the pathway of getting the data through the prestige information to prevent from being hacked, IT personnel must disable the port for their security purposes.
• Block websites that can send files, an example of this is MediaFire, MediaFire can send files up to 10GB, this is enough to use hackers to steal data and send it to their perspective MediaFire account, to prevent this action IT personal must disable this king of websites.

SET PENALTIES

• In order to avoid insider attacks and other suspicious activities of an employee, the organization must have this kind of policy to remind every employee that he/she must avoid doing such risky moves.