By Katie Brenneman
As a business owner, you take tremendous pride in your organization and the employees and partners who make the work happen. Your business is far more than your livelihood. Your business is your passion, purpose, mission, and reputation.
That means that you would do almost anything to protect your company, and all those affected by it, from harm. However, it’s not always easy to recognize and neutralize potential treats, especially when they come from within your organization.
Business owners and leaders must educate themselves on the many forms that insider threats may take. Understanding insider threats and how they occur is the first and most crucial step if you want to prevent them from impacting your business.
Intentional Harm
Though it’s unpleasant to think about, the reality is that some insider attacks are perpetrated intentionally. They are maliciously inflicted by bad actors, whether internal employees or third-party partners. Though the motivation for these malicious attacks is often the pursuit of personal gain, disgruntled insiders with access to sensitive data may also execute an internal attack to damage the company, both financially and reputationally.
When harm is inflicted deliberately, mere termination is typically not a sufficient response, particularly if you want to deter anything similar from happening in the future. Malicious insider attacks may involve not only the willful violation of company policies but also of legal statutes. Depending on the nature of the attack, you may even need to pursue legal action.
Unintentional Harm
As potentially devastating as a deliberate attack by an insider may be, often the greatest risk to your company comes in the form of an unintentional error or employee negligence. Indeed, the evidence suggests that most internal breaches occur due to employees falling for a phishing, smishing, or related social engineering scam.
In addition to employees’ succumbing to social engineering scams, another significant error-related internal threat involves the use of unsecured devices to create, send, or receive business materials or information. When company data are stored on unsecured platforms, this not only makes them far more vulnerable to an external brute force attack, as well as to loss or theft. A tablet containing sensitive documents, for instance, may easily be misplaced or stolen. Likewise, a laptop connected to public Wi-Fi may be easily breached.
For this reason, business leaders must establish a clear cybersecurity policy that prohibits the creation or sharing of work materials on devices not issued by the employer. All company-issued devices should feature strong security platforms, such as the installation of a virtual private network (VPN) to be used for all company-related activity.
These regulations, moreover, need to be reinforced by zero-tolerance policies, policies that are introduced during the onboarding process and consistently reinforced for all employees throughout the year.
The Third Party Threat
In the increasingly globalized economy, businesses of every size and stripe are increasingly compelled to contract with third-party vendors to maximize productivity, efficiency, and profitability. While this makes good business sense, such a strategy can also carry a significant amount of risk when it comes to internal security. For contractors to perform their work, they’re almost certainly going to require some level of access to sensitive information.
Unless you are fully cognizant of your partners’ security policies and procedures, your partnerships may well be leaving your company vulnerable to attack. Your security platform, after all, is only as strong as its weakest link.
When you’re contracting with a third party, you must codify security requirements, policies, procedures, and responsibilities. The vendor contract should also outline the consequences for failure to adhere to these terms, ranging from contract termination to financial penalties to litigation.
Threats From Former Employees
When an employee separates from your company — whether through voluntary resignation or termination — they inevitably carry with them lots of valuable information that may pose a threat to your company, stakeholders, and clients.
For instance, they may retain passwords or administrator permissions on their work devices that can grant them continued access to sensitive data long after their relationship with the company has ended. This means former employees can pose the same risk for intentional and unintentional harm as current staff and third-party contractors.
To protect your business against these threats, you need to have a clear, consistent, and streamlined offboarding process. This should include, at a minimum, processes to immediately revoke the former employee’s system access, change relevant passwords, and reclaim work-issued technology, including tablets, smartphones, and other devices.
The Takeaway
Your employees and partners are the engines that keep your business humming. This doesn’t mean they can’t pose a threat to your organization, however. Learning to identify the various forms an insider threat may take, though, is often the first and most important step in protecting your business from them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katie Brenneman is a passionate writer specializing in lifestyle, mental health, education, and fitness-related content. When she isn’t writing, you can find her with her nose buried in a book or hiking with her dog, Charlie. To connect with Brenneman, you can follow her on Twitter.
