Among the numerous cyber threats businesses face today, insider threats are one of the most challenging to overcome. An insider threat is any employee, contractor, business associate, or other person who has access to an organization’s critical data and can cause harm to the business, either accidentally or maliciously.
Recent studies have shown that insider threats are responsible for around 22% of all security incidents,1 and the average total cost of a single insider incident rose to over $750,000 last year.2 While these statistics reflect an alarming trend, protecting your business is possible by taking proactive steps toward insider threat prevention. In this blog, we’ll go over the components needed for proactive insider threat prevention so you can better protect your business.
Components of Proactive Insider Threat Prevention
Proactive insider threat prevention starts with implementing measures to recognize and stop a threat before it can lead to a significant data breach. This typically involves educating your staff about cyber threats, taking steps to monitor and investigate potential threats, and remaining adaptable in the face of the ever-changing cyber landscape. Let’s explore these components in more detail:
Keep Your Staff Trained on Cybersecurity Best Practices
Negligence is the most common factor behind insider threats, accounting for 62% of all incidents.3 The best way to ensure your employees can spot cyber threats is to educate them on cyber security best practices and company policies via regular training. Inform your staff that if they see something that looks off or a colleague acting unusually, they should immediately report the potential threat to your IT department.
Incorporating weekly reminders or activities can also go a long way toward keeping these cybersecurity best practices fresh in their minds. Consider using various methods such as emails, face-to-face interviews, and break room posters to make sure preventing cyber threats stays a priority for your team.
Optimize Your Infrastructure for Cyber Threat Detection
Your company should have easy-to-understand policies in place to deter insider threats. These policies should be easily accessible and reinforced during company meetings so that your employees know the importance of being accountable for data security – and the repercussions of negligence or malicious intent.
In addition to strictly enforced policies, there must be systems within your IT infrastructure to identify data breaches – and their sources – as quickly as possible. Any user accessing critical data should be accounted for, thereby reducing the breach response time by revealing when an unauthorized person views something they shouldn’t have access to. Stopping a data breach is significantly easier with an efficient audit trail.
Your IT infrastructure should also have systems in place that limit the damage when a security breach is detected. Regular data backups help your organization prevent major downtime, quickly getting your systems back up when data is compromised or lost. Additionally, once your team uncovers a data breach, they should create new policies and procedures to ensure it doesn't happen again. Taking proactive measures by purging dormant accounts, restricting third-party access, and monitoring user data also goes a long way toward effective insider threat prevention.
Having a trusted partner to enforce these policies and manage your IT infrastructure helps ensure you’re protected against insider threats. Our ebook goes over how security-as-a-service helps deter these cyber threats.
Remain Adaptable as Cyber Threats Evolve
Adaptability is vital for keeping your organization's cybersecurity policies relevant as insider threats – and cyber threats as a whole – evolve. While implementing systems to detect and mitigate threats and training your staff on best practices are essential for insider threat prevention, your business's needs and exposure to threats will change.
There isn't a "one-size-fits-all" approach for cybersecurity, so ensure your IT team is prepared to adapt your policies and procedures as needed. Flexible, innovative approaches to cybersecurity can help your team deter threats, minimize disruption, and prevent malicious activities more effectively to save your company the money, time, and stress of a major data breach.
Protect Your Network With Xceptional’s Security Solutions
Preventing cyber threats, including insider threats, from harming your business should be a top priority. Whether data breaches occur maliciously or by accident, insider incidents will likely continue to increase. By keeping your staff educated, enacting cybersecurity policies, ensuring your infrastructure can detect and mitigate threats, and remaining adaptable, you can leverage a security strategy that keeps your organization secure and successful.
If you're unsure how to start protecting your business from insider threats, partnering with a security expert like Xceptional can help. We tailor our Network Security solutions to meet your organization's specific security needs, from keeping your technology platforms updated to providing 24/7 managerial support.
Trust Xceptional to:
- Ensure your protections are up to date by running regular patches and updates backed by 24/7 monitoring.
- Automatically patch any vulnerabilities before cyber criminals have the chance to exploit them.
- Monitor all devices with access to your organization's network to ensure they're operating without any "health" concerns that may indicate malicious activity.
Reach out to the Xceptional team today to learn more about how we help businesses like yours grow with reliable, flexible managed IT and security solutions.
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