14 DAY TRIAL // Most businesses generally focus on ensuring security against outside threats, but leaking of sensitive information is oftentimes owed to factors within the factory.
By trying to mitigate security risks resulting from attacks from outside their systems, some companies forget that a clever adversary would resort to multiple methods of compromise, most of them insidious in nature.
A form of social engineering, phishing emails are one of the most efficient ways a threat actor could get access to restricted information in a business’ systems. Carefully crafted and targeted, these could fool an employee to give up essential details that could help an attacker make their way through the network to the coveted prize.
They can be used to obtain a username or a password, as well as for deploying a malicious file on the targeted computer, in order to funnel out important files.
If the crooks have done their homework, they should have sufficient information about the victim to be able to gain their trust and determine them to execute the malware on the computer.
There have also been plenty of cases where the victim did this just because they were intrigued by the message and wanted to peek into someone else’s business.
To mitigate the risk of falling victim to phishing attempts, sometimes special programs are initiated, to teach employees of the right way to treat a suspicious message.
However, since each individual is unique, there are different reactions to the same stimuli, and even when success is achieved, tweaking the stimuli could see an occasional return of the bad habits of the victim.
Apart from phishing, employee negligence can also lead to compromising data available only to certain key members of the team. Losing a company device with sensitive details and connecting to the business' network without using a secure connection are just two of the possibilities adversaries seek to take advantage of in order to get in.
Without enforcing full security measures, an intrusion is more likely to occur sooner rather than later. Threat actors may compromise the device of an employee and conduct their breach once the gadget is behind the network of the targeted entity.
With the increasing popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) and iOS and Android being no tough nut to crack by crooks, companies should really think about implementing strict policies regulating the use of personal computing devices inside the enterprise.
Both iOS and Android are vulnerable to fairly the same type of attacks, when usage in a corporate environment is concerned, and a motivated threat actor knows exactly what to do in order to carry out their job.
Referring to the recent incident involving Goodwill stores, Eric Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust, told us via email that companies should adopt a proactive stance to security, so that they can also address the insider threats.
“The potential breach at Goodwill is another wake up call to organizations that breaches are happening more often and getting bigger. A big reason for this is that they’re happening from the inside, which increases the magnitude of the breach as well as makes them difficult to detect. Every company is at risk and needs to take a proactive approach to security.
“Traditional perimeter-based security approaches do not address insider threats - companies need to take an ‘inside-out’ approach to security to make sure that critical systems and data are secure from inside the network,” he said.