There is no shortage of cybersecurity offerings that can detect, prevent and mitigate problems. One of the challenges organizations face today isn’t whether or not an offering works, but whether or not it can scale easily and quickly across an enterprise-sized environment.
When it comes to combating the insider threat, CISOs and other security leaders have fully acknowledged that it must be dealt with, which has upped demand. The hurdle has now become how to address it at scale.
During the RSA conference, Dtex CTO and founder Mohan Koo spoke with ISMG reporter Tom Field about how to respond to the insider threat across widely distributed organizations with hundreds of thousands of employees and endpoints.
According to Mohan, today’s solutions have to provide analytics, automation, threat prioritization, user-friendliness, business unit cooperation, reduced impact on endpoints, and real-time alerts. To learn more about how Dtex is helping customers achieve insider threat detection at scale, Check out the full interview: Mitigating the Insider Threat at Scale
More Insider Threat
The Dtex 2019 Insider Threat Intelligence Report revealed that the majority of insider threat incidents are caused by negligent insiders. These are employees and other insiders who create problems due to mistakes or disregard for security controls and policies.
When it comes to the negligent class, one trend seems to be dominating the media landscape lately. It’s the accidental exposure of data in popular cloud applications and data bases. This year’s report found that such exposures are happening in 98 percent of organizations.
In the media, we are seeing reports of this happening over and over again. The following list of recent headlines shows where and why it’s occuring. In all, the records exposed in these stories alone add up to more that 1.5 billion:
TechCrunch: A family tracking app was leaking real-time location data
SC Magazine: Kanopy.com ElasticSearch database left unsecured
Motherboard: Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users’ Passwords Exposed Online
Security Discovery: 800+ Million Emails Leaked Online by Email Verification Service
Security Discovery: Dow Jones Risk Screening Watchlist Exposed Publicly in a Major Data Breach
Wired: HERE’S WHAT IT’S LIKE TO ACCIDENTALLY EXPOSE THE DATA OF 230M PEOPLE
Negligent users aren’t the only ones causing headaches. Malicious insiders, which account for 23 percent of the insider threat problem, are kicking up clouds of dust that businesses and law enforcement groups are having to navigate through. Some of the more recent cases to make the headlines include:
Electrek: Tesla says Chinese startup Xpeng stole Autopilot source code through former employee. According to reporter Fred Lambert:
Tesla has filed a lawsuit today against a former employee who worked on Autopilot, whom allegedly stole the source code of the semi-autonomous driving system for Chinese EV startup Xpeng, which describes itself as being inspired by Tesla.
The Australian: Data theft ‘load of nonsense.’ According to the story:
A former contractor for wealth giant AMP said he was motivated to steal the personal data of customers after watching a TV series about the “dark web” and did not know downloading the data was illegal.
He was caught in December after he attempted to install a “dark web” internet browser on his AMP laptop, using an external USB storage device; a move that prompted AMP’s software program Dtex to automatically alert cybersecurity staff.
Beta News: 61 percent of CISOs believe employees have leaked data maliciously. Writes Ian Barker:
A new study reveals that 79 percent of IT leaders believe that employees have put company data at risk accidentally in the last 12 months, and 61 percent believe they have done so maliciously.
Read more about how Dtex responds to the malicious and negligent insider threat problem: How Dtex Fights the Insider Threat
Some Final ThoughtsIt’s no secret that there are now thousands of cybersecurity providers all vying for a piece of public and private sector IT budgets. It is becoming such a knife fight that CISOs are beginning to voice concern over the relentless barrage of sales tactics they are being hit with, according to CNBC’s Kate Fazzini. Learn a bit more about what a few of the unwelcome tactics are in her recent story: Desperate to get through to executives, some cybersecurity vendors are resorting to lies and blackmail