Technology associated insider threats are a significant security threat to organizations. They occur when employees, former employees, contractors and partners gain access to sensitive data and systems that could harm the organization. These threats are difficult to detect, and often go undetected for years before they are discovered and addressed.

Reduce Technology Associated Insider Threats

The best way to reduce technology associated insider threats is to ensure that you have a security strategy that emphasizes defense and depth. This strategy should include limiting physical and logical access to critical infrastructure, strong identity verification technologies like biometric authentication, and security policies that restrict employee actions.

Use Behavior Monitoring Software to Identify Misbehaving Employees

User behavior monitoring is an effective tool for identifying misbehaving employees who might be stealing or harming company data. These tools can track user activity to detect suspicious actions such as copying files or deleting critical information. Techfinancedollar.com can also help you determine when employees are violating your company's data usage policy or computer and Internet use policies.

Use Machine Learning Analytics to Detect Patterns

While current security solutions rely on rules and signatures, this isn't enough to detect insider threats. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications can analyze disk-level storage behavior to discover anomalies that indicate an insider's intent.

Invest in Enterprise-Wide Risk Assessments and Continually Enhance Your IT Security Infrastructure

A thorough risk assessment is key to determining your organization's critical assets and vulnerabilities, and how they could be affected by insider threats. This will enable you to prioritize and enhance your IT security infrastructure according to risk priority.

Delete Unused and Dormant Accounts and Privileges

Many security teams are aware of accounts with legitimate privileges that have remained unused for a period of time. These can be accounts belonging to departing employees that have not been purged, or genuine accounts maintained by disgruntled or rogue users.

Delete these accounts and privileges as soon as possible, or else your organization may be subject to an insider breach. This will prevent them from gaining access to your system and sensitive data that could be damaging.

Maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date list of all employees, ex-employees, contractors, business associates and partners who have unauthorized access to your company's system and data. This will allow your CISO to monitor the unauthorized access of any privileged users and to take action as necessary to protect your organization's data.

Implement a Security Awareness Program to Deter Potential Insider Threats

A security awareness program helps you educate your staff about the importance of keeping their personal devices secure and away from your organization's network. It will also help you set up alerts to notify you when your employees break your company's data usage policy or computer/Internet use policies.

Use Data Loss Prevention to Prevent Authenticated Unauthorized Access

DLP is an important tool for preventing technology associated insider threats because it can identify and block access to confidential information. It can also encrypt data in transit to avoid it being compromised by malware.