Inside the Insider

Some employees become malicious over time; others may be spies planted to conduct industrial espionage; while still others simply make mistakes that unknowingly put the organisation at risk.

A number of variables motivate insiders, but the end result is that they can more easily perpetrate their crimes than an outsider who has limited access.

It doesn’t take a skilled hacker to print out sensitive data, copy files to an MP3 player or send confidential information to a competitor. Because of this, anybody can become a malicious insider—from the disgruntled system administrator hoping to sabotage access to business critical systems to the human resources intern that is selling employee salary information to recruiters.

Insiders can directly damage your business resulting in lost revenue, lost customers, reduced shareholder faith, a tarnished reputation, regulatory fines and legal fees.

So what is the root cause of insider threats? In most of the cases we have investigated it has been either due to accidental data leaks that occur because employees or contractors lack sufficient knowledge about preventative measures and they are simply careless.

In addition, it could also be due to corporate sabotage such as the deliberate destruction of IT equipment which also occurs frequently because employees or contractors are malicious or disgruntled.

Our clients believe that their system admin and other privileged users appear to represent a much lower insider risk to their organisation, although they have the most access.