How to Prevent Insider Data Breaches at your Business

Guest article by Dan Baker of SecureTeam

Majority of security systems are installed to try and forestall any external threats to a business’ network, but what about the security threats that are inside your organisation and your network?

Data breaches have the potential to expose a large amount of sensitive, private or confidential information that might be on your network. Insider threats are a significant threat to your business and are increasingly being seen as an issue that needs dealing with.

SecureTeam are experts in cybersecurity and provide a variety of cybersecurity consultation solutions to a range of businesses. They have used their extensive knowledge of internal network security to write this handy guide to help businesses protect themselves from insider data breaches.

Who is considered an Insider Threat?
Insider threats can come from a variety of different sources and can pose a risk to your business that you might not have considered.

Malicious Insider 

This is when an employee who might have legitimate access to your network has malicious intentions and uses that access to intentionally leak confidential data. Employees who intentionally provide access to the network to an external attacker are also included in this threat.

Accidental Insider

This is when an employee makes an honest mistake that could result in a data breach. Something as simple as opening a malicious link in an email or sending sensitive information to the wrong recipient are all considered data breaches. The main cause of accidental insider data breaches is poor employee education around security and data protection and can be avoided by practising good security practices.

Third Party

There is a data protection risk that arises when third-party contractors or consultants are provided with permission to access certain areas of the network. They could, intentionally or unintentionally, use their permission to access private information and potentially cause a data breach. Past employees who haven’t had their security access revoked could also access confidential information they are no longer entitled too and could be seen as a threat.

Social Engineers

Although this threat is technically external a social engineers aim is to exploit employees by interacting with them and then attempting to manipulate them into providing access to the network or revealing sensitive information.

Data breaches from internal threats have the potential to cause the loss of sensitive or confidential information that can damage your business’ reputation and cost you a significant amount of money. There are some ways you can attempt to prevent insider data breaches, however. 

How to prevent Data Breaches
There are a few simple ways you can try to prevent an internal data breach, including:

Identify your Sensitive Data

The first step to securing your data is to identify and list all of the private information that you have stored in your network and taking note of who in your organisation has access to it. By gathering all of this information you are able to secure it properly and create a data protection policy which will help keep your sensitive data secure.

Create a Data Protection Policy

A data protection policy should outline the guidelines regarding the handling of sensitive data, privacy and security to your employees. By explaining to your staff what they are expected to do when handling confidential information you reduce the risk of an accidental insider data breach.

Create a Culture of Accountability

Both employees and managers should be aware of and understand their responsibilities and the responsibilities of their team when it comes to the handling of sensitive information. By making your team aware of their responsibilities and the consequences of mistakes and negative behaviour you can create a culture of accountability. This also has the more positive effect of highlighting any issues that exist before they develop into full problems which can then be dealt with training or increased monitoring.

Utilise Strong Credentials & Access Control

By making use of stronger credentials, restricting logins to an onsite location and preventing concurrent logins you can make your network stronger and remove the risk of stolen credentials being used to access the network from an external location.

Review Accounts and Privileged Access

It is important that you regularly review your user's privileges and account logins to ensure that any dormant accounts no longer have access to private information and that users don’t have unnecessary access to data. This helps to reduce the risks of both accidental and malicious insider data breaches.

Conclusion
The threat of an insider data breach continues to be an issue to businesses throughout a range of sectors. However, by putting a plan in place for these insider security threats it improves the speed and effectiveness of your response to any potential issues that arise.

It is sensible to assume that most, if not all, businesses will come under attack eventually and by taking the threat seriously and adhering to the best security practices then you can help to prevent an attack turning into a full-blown data breach.