Typically, many organisations look for cyber threats on the outside. However, some of the most damaging cyber attacks are those that come from within.
When the members of an organisation pose a cyber threat to the company’s data, they are called insider threats.
There are many types of insider threats that can cause serious harm to a company’s functions. These threats need to be mitigated by taking certain necessary safety measures to protect the integrity of your system.
However, most organisations aren’t aware of the various methods used to prevent threats within the company. That’s why we’re here to help!
In this blog post, we have brought you eight simple tips to help you prevent insider threats and protect your business.
1. Implement Employee Monitoring Software
We begin with the most effective tip to protect your data against all insider threats—employee monitoring software. Using employee monitoring software can efficiently help you monitor the activities of your employees in real time.
You can use this software to efficiently predict and investigate unusual behaviour that points to potential insider threats.
With our brilliant cyber security services, we can install and regulate the software into your system with previously set rules to comply with the routine functions of the business. This way, we can program triggers into the software that detect various threats pointing to data theft, sabotage, etc.
2. Educate Your Employees
One of the most commonly occurring types of insider threats in cybersecurity is negligence. In so many instances where a company’s data has suffered sabotage and damage, the cause has been attributed to a lack of cyber security education.
Negligent employees pose great danger to the company and have to be educated to prevent an organisation from potential cyber threats. Although it won’t prevent all insider attacks, it will make it harder for malicious insider threats to execute their ulterior motives.
Cyber education can also help the employees notice if something fishy takes place in their surroundings and report it. Additionally, by educating your employees about the importance of protecting their data, you also save them from a cyber threat to their personal data.
3. Strengthen Your Authentication
Another great idea to strengthen your company’s cyber security is to strengthen its authentication. Most organisations use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure maximum security.
With the help of MFA, a potential threat won’t be able to access your system even if they have the user ID and the password.
Other than MFA, it is also important that you maintain a high level of complexity for the passwords used across your systems. Unpredictable and non-repeating passwords are another great way to ensure maximum protection.
4. Trust No One
No matter what the employee’s rank is, trust no one. In more than a few cyber attacks, the perpetrator has been someone the employer completely trusted. Privileged access is one of the biggest insider threats in cyber security.
Employees who can override all security barriers and access impenetrable data can become a serious threat to the company.
However, in some cases, when there is an absolute requirement to provide admin access to certain employees, monitor them closely. Using an advanced employee monitoring system can efficiently help you keep a check on your most trustworthy employees.
5. Implement Proper Access Controls
Access controls are an important component of detecting and preventing insider threats in cybersecurity. By limiting access to sensitive information based on roles and responsibilities, you can ensure that only authorised employees can access specific data.
Unmonitored Third-Party Access is another severe threat to your cyber security. There are usually two possibilities in this scenario. The first one is that the third party that you are associated with, is in itself a threat and poses a danger to your systems.
The second one would be a weak cyber security system on their end, causing your data to be vulnerable to a world filled with hackers and other cyber threats. In this case, competitors can also try to access your data by hacking into their system.
Preventing both these types of insider threats is simply possible by efficiently minimising access and effectively monitoring activities.
6. Eliminate Idle Accounts
Ensuring that non-active users, such as former employees, are unable to access your IT system or sensitive information is an important aspect of insider threat management.
Eliminate any orphaned and dormant accounts within your directory and monitor for unused accounts and privileges.
7. Use Threat Modelling
Use threat modelling at a large scale to understand your threat landscape, such as threat vectors relating to vulnerabilities or malicious code.
Use this information to identify who may compromise your system and how they might access your assets. By understanding potential threats, you can put in place proper security controls.
8. Investigate Unusual Behaviour
Always investigate any suspicious or unusual activity that occurs in your organisation’s LAN to identify any malicious employees. Through behaviour monitoring and analysis, you can identify and stop any potential insider threats. However, you also need to understand the monitoring laws that apply to you.
Choose Redpalm To Prevent Insider Threats
With the incredible amount of information traversing across the internet, cyber threats are a major problem for any organisation.
Insider threats are just one of many cybersecurity threats that can cause serious damage to a company’s functions and reputation. Therefore, all businesses need to enforce cybersecurity in their organisation; and that’s where Redpalm comes in.
At Redpalm, our cyber security solutions help you protect your business against various internal and external cyber threats.
With years of experience in providing all our customers with the most efficient cybersecurity services, we aim for absolute customer satisfaction.
We also offer various other services such as proactive monitoring, incident response, cloud services, technology procurement, IT audits and health checks, and more.
With the world being what it is, it’s the right time to work with one of the best IT service providers in the country for ultimate cyber protection. To learn more about our services, click here or contact us to schedule an appointment today.