One of the significant security concerns for cloud-related infrastructure is insider threats.

Since cloud computing is set to be a key component in business sustainability by 2028, it’s crucial to remain vigilant and continuously monitor threats that could compromise your organization’s security and sensitive data.

The rapid rise in cloud dependency has also seen a 28% increase in insider-driven data leaks, exposure, loss, or theft between 2023 and 2024. 71% of companies witnessed 21-40 insider security threats in 2023 alone!

In this article, we will explore how adopting cloud-based environments increases the risk of insider threats and what businesses can do to avoid vulnerability.

What Are Insider Threats?

Insider threats are cyberattacks that originate from within the organization and are caused by individuals with authorized access to sensitive data, systems, and networks. These individuals could be former or current employees, board members, business partners, consultants, etc.

It typically involves users abusing their authorized access to data and resources, which damages the company’s information, equipment, systems, and networks. This may be sabotage, resource degradation, espionage, corruption, unauthorized data disclosure, and even terrorism. Sometimes, these attacks are a gateway for hackers to install ransomware or malware into the company’s cloud infrastructure.

Types Of Insider Threats

Data loss and security exploits through insider threats come in various forms; these include:

  1. Intentional: An intentional threat occurs when an individual deliberately plans to harm a company. Motives usually include “getting even” over some issues with the company or if an external party has bribed them.
  2. Unintentional: An unintentional threat occurs when data loss or breach occurs due to an error or negligence by someone authorized to access data. These are careless, accidental incidents that occur due to human mistakes like sending an email to the wrong address, visiting malicious links, or ineffective disposal of sensitive info.
  3. Malicious: Similar to intentional threats, malicious ones are intended to cause harm for vengeance or personal benefit. Typically, the insider leaks sensitive data, sabotages high-end systems or equipment, steals data, and blackmails company officials. They may also expose this data to third-party organizations, hackers, and rival enterprises for personal or financial gain.
  4. Third-party: Third-party threats are typically business partners, vendors, freelancers, or contractors who have access to a company’s sensitive data and compromise the cloud security. These can be negligent or malicious in intent.
  5. Collusive: These threats often involve a dual dynamic between a malicious insider and an external partner who work together to compromise a company’s cloud infrastructure. The external source is usually a cybercriminal who recruits a company employee to steal intellectual property in exchange for money.

Here are common insider threat examples:

  • Destroying, stealing, or leaking company data.
  • Breaking into networks, systems, or other IT resources.
  • Selling company information or secrets.
  • Misplacing company data or equipment.
  • Falling victim to hackers and online scammers.
  • Misconfiguring database or network settings.

Why Should You Monitor Insider Threats?

Insider threats are hard to detect and respond to and pose a severe risk to cloud security, especially those with malicious motives. According to research, insider risks related to negligence, malintent, and credential theft have grown by 44% in the last two years alone!

While you may have systems in place to protect your cloud, sensitive data can get into the hands of untrustworthy individuals through various means, such as:

  • General access to protected data
  • Computers that are attached to the company’s network
  • Developers with access to data, services, or products
  • Badges and other devices that permit access to critical data

Thus, insider threats pose a dynamic and complex risk that impacts the private and public domains of all critical infrastructure sectors within a company. So, monitoring and identifying these threats is essential to understanding and designing an insider threat detection program.

Common Indicators Of Insider Threats

If you find any of your employees involved in any of the following behaviors, you should consider investigating their actions to prevent insider threats:

  • Visiting the office outside typical shift hours
  • Downloading large mass of files
  • Accessing different systems or files than usual
  • Suddenly receiving emails with large attachments
  • working overtime excessively or when not needed

Best Practices To Mitigate Insider Threats

Keeping your company’s cloud data, networks, and systems secure requires a collaborative approach of human effort and tech-driven aid. If your company hasn’t already implemented this, here are the six best practices to mitigate insider threats.

Identify Risky Insiders

An estimated 10% of company cloud users are risky. However, the average user does not intend to misuse or steal data from the cloud, making insider threats more of an issue of carelessness than malice.

High-risk employees become high-risk cloud users; these include:

  • New hires
  • Resigned or terminated employees
  • Remote workers
  • Third-party users like freelancers, partners, contractors, etc.
  • Temporary staff
  • Employees with language barriers

Strict Access Control

One of the best ways to mitigate insider threats is to strictly control who can access the organization’s cloud data and systems. Many businesses choose zero-trust architecture to add an extra layer of security. The approach involves implementing identity verification when a user tries to access critical information.

You can also employ a system based on employee privilege in which users’ access is limited or minimal and only elevated when necessary. You can also include conditional access measures such as geofencing and company mobile with containerized security.

If everyone at your organization has access to some form of data or system, consider reviewing their involvement to determine whether their role or responsibilities require them to have such access. This lets you align your existing access permissions with current business and security needs.

Monitor User Activity

Safeguarding your assets requires regular monitoring of employee or third-party activity within your infrastructure. Once you identify which users require elevated access rights, these also become a heightened risk. So, pay close attention to their actions related to cloud data and systems. Keeping tabs on user activity lets you detect any privileged account discrepancies or misuse early on.

With user activity tools, you can get real-time access to cloud user sessions. Observing these sessions with the company’s sensitive data automatically increases your cloud security due to continuous monitoring and early detection of insider threats; this way, you can make informed decisions and quickly respond to suspicious user activity.

Security Awareness Training

Even if your organization invests in a comprehensive security and privacy pack to ensure that the cloud is protected from insider threats, it’s essential to have appropriate security awareness protocols in place. As a general rule of thumb, continually educate your employees about company rules and regulations, security guidelines, and policies primarily related to sensitive data. This best practice is designed to reduce unwitting insider threats and risks.

It is crucial that all employees, regardless of their role, receive security awareness and data handling training. This will ensure they understand their pivotal and valued role in protecting enterprise resources. Trustworthy employees will benefit from this training by making fewer errors when handling data, while the training is less likely to be effective for malicious insiders.

Implementing Data Security Posture Management

Nowadays, most organizations process and store sensitive data, including personally identifiable information, financial information, protected health information, and business-related intellectual property across databases, SaaS solutions, applications, and more.

Data security posture management (DSP) involves securing stored data while automating data-related tasks. The more valuable and complex your data is, the better it is to use DSP to identify sensitive data, check its use, and take necessary actions.

The components of DSP management that work together to protect your data include:

1.    Discovering and Classifying Data

Protecting sensitive data requires an accurate understanding of where it lives. The goal is to create a complete inventory of sensitive data and identify its storage. All data should be classified based on regulatory frameworks so the company can quickly determine who accesses it and how to secure it.

2.    Monitoring Data

Protecting the cloud’s data is a repetitive cycle that requires continuous scanning for new data and detecting potential security threats to existing data. You must oversee every process of data collection, storage, and usage. This gives you a holistic view of your data and its use, where, how, or why.

3.    Prioritizing Data

After identifying what data should be considered sensitive, it’s also important to segregate and prioritize it based on the level of sensitivity and vulnerability to insider threats. Doing so helps your cyber security team determine potential data attack paths and choose which data requires immediate attention.

4.    Data Security Risk Remediation

Risk remediation only occurs after finding all the vulnerabilities within your environment and the cloud’s data. The process involves using automated tools that perform continuous checks based on evolving data security standards like SOC 2 and GDPR. You can also create personalized risk detection guidelines tailored to your company’s unique data security necessities.

Cloud Infrastructure Audits

Regular cloud audits help you evaluate your security effectiveness and find any loopholes that leave you vulnerable to insider threats. You can identify areas of improvement, comply with cybersecurity standards, and ensure your cloud is up to date with industry laws and regulations.

Here are some actions you can take based on what your audit reveals:

1.    Physical Security

Restrict your employees’ physical access to sensitive infrastructure and critical areas. Install access control and security camera systems to monitor physical access. You can also upgrade to biometric security using fingerprint or retina authentication to verify user identities before allowing them to enter restricted spaces.

2.    Server Security

Ensure the digital footprint of your sensitive data is secure with platforms that safeguards sensitive data against weak authentication practices, attacks, outdated software risks, insufficient backup, and lack of DDoS Protection. The features included are DDoS mitigation, vulnerability scanner, IP Safelisting, SSL certification, regular security monitoring, and automated protection with Fail2Ban.

3.    Incident Response

Create a thorough incident response program (IRP) with a list of procedures to handle insider threats. This includes specifying requirements, establishing a team, planning recovery options, and listing the right authorities to report the incident. You should diversify the IRP by mentioning levels of data breaches, incident severity, and types of affected resources. Test your program regularly and improve it based on prior incidents.

4.    Whistleblower Plan

Suppose employees doubt or witness anything suspicious; set up discrete protocols for them to inform board members or HR. Create anonymous reporting provisions for employees and ensure that the senior leadership takes these reports seriously and conducts further investigations.

5.    Third-Party Risk Management

Extend your company’s security policies to third-party sources like partners, consultants, or an external entity with access to your cloud and systems. Conduct regular audits of their activity and ensure they follow mandated security practices.

6.    Exit Strategies

If you identify any users with suspicious activity, you must have strict exit procedures. Create a plan that immediately revokes their access. Similarly, when employees leave the company, cancel their access by asking them to return all company assets and disabling their log-in credentials from the company cloud and systems.

7.    Legal Measures

Have legal agreements and contracts in place that explicitly specify unauthorized data access or insider threat consequences. You’ll also have to notify the GDPR or other law enforcement and follow state-mandated guidelines in the event of any data breach.

Mistakes To Avoid To Keep Your Cloud Secure

  • Not Having Access Control: When all users have 24/7 access to sensitive company data, this can lead to network and system compromise.
  • Not Having Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): Poor identity access management with crackable passwords leaves your cloud susceptible to malware, brute force attacks, phishing, etc. To ensure that the data is protected at all times, you must use a combination of MFA, stringent password management systems and strong antivirus for PC, laptops, and all the organizational devices.
  • Misconfiguration Errors: This can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data and threaten your company’s cloud. Similarly, storing credentials, access keys, and other security information in plain text or including them in code exposes the cloud to unauthorized attacks.
  • No Data Encryption: Encryption is paramount to cloud security, so you must use industry-standard algorithms, correct key management practices, and ensure all data that leaves your servers is encrypted.
  • No Data Backup: Identify critical data and integrate your cloud infrastructure with a reliable backup solution like data loss prevention software. This way, in case of data loss, you won’t have to scramble to recover your data.
  • Unawareness About Security Best Practices: Untrained employees who are unaware of data security practices and privacy violations are a threat. Train employees about security best practices, such as policies, passwords, potential attacks, etc.

Conclusion

Within the dynamic landscape of web-based work, companies must stay aware and ahead of both malicious and unintentional insider incidents. A vital element in securing your company’s cloud infrastructure in this evolving environment is to implement comprehensive risk management, encompassing an insider risk program; this way, you’ll stay ahead of growing threats and keep your company’s cloud data protected.