Many organizations focus their cybersecurity efforts on external threats, layering defenses against malware, viruses, ransomware and more. However, according to Forrester’s May 2019 report, Best Practices: Mitigating Insider Threats, 53% of data breaches are coming from insiders, including employees, third-party vendors, and contractors. That’s why Proofpoint has announced the industry’s first Insider Threat Analytics solution, which uses community-driven intelligence to provide the most up-to-date data on ever-changing Insider Threat patterns.
What is an Insider Threat?
First things first, an Insider Threat is someone with authorized access to an organization who abuses or misuses that access, resulting in negative effects to the organization's systems and private information. This can range anywhere from on-site employees to third-party vendors and contractors. Insider Threat detection is especially difficult given the rapidly changing online landscape, and Insider Threat analytics are a great strategy to identify behavioral patterns to prevent future threats or breaches.
Equipped with the knowledge from Proofpoint's Insider Threat Analytics solution, organizations can stay ahead of emerging Insider Threats and protect their most valuable assets. Here are three reasons why that’s important.
Collective Knowledge Provides Deep Insider Threat Insights
Insider Threat patterns cross industry verticals. Many of the same accidental and malicious usage patterns are seen across many different industries be they in hedge fund, retail banks, in the technology sector or manufacturing. Looking around the cybersecurity landscape, indicator and intel sharing is focused on external threat actors, but not so much the damage that can be wrought by insiders. Proofpoint is trying to close the gap. Using Proofpoint's Insider Threat Analytics solution, organizations can mitigate Insider Threats using patterns observed at real organizations, harnessing the collective knowledge from these organizations.
Proofpoint's Insider Threat Analytics solution provides broad and rich insider threat indicators across a variety of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, technology services, business consulting, telecommunications and retail. Using analytics, the data set is analyzed in real time to identify a common set of Insider Threat patterns and categories such as uploading files on the web, using unlisted USB drives, and more. Proofpoint customers can access this. Intelligence as part of the Insider Threat Library.
Using this intelligence library, security analysts can quickly understand the source of common insider threat patterns, whether they’re old mainstays or emerging ones.
Insider Threat Analytics Can Help Teams Investigate Faster
One of the biggest challenges security teams face is understanding what security incident happened quickly enough to take swift action and prevent information loss. When it comes to Insider Threats, many organizations rely on layered legacy security tools to investigate Insider Threats, such as security information and event management (SIEM) or data loss prevention (DLP) solutions.
Unfortunately, these tools often fall short because they lack sufficient context into both user and data activity. In addition, security analysts may find themselves inundated with irrelevant alerts, or sifting through a sea of alerts in order to identify the root cause of an incident. These information gaps can cause incident investigations to drag on for far longer than they should.
Instead, Proofpoint's Insider Threat Analytics can help organizations quickly identify the source of an Insider Threat incident, speeding the time to investigate from days or months to just minutes or hours. Using Proofpoint, security analysts can view a combination of user and data activity in a timeline format, to understand exactly who did what, when, where, and why. Proofpoint's extensive Insider Threat Analytics provides the most updated intelligence on Insider Threat indicators, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Proactive Insider Threat Management Starts with Good Data
Whether they’re acting maliciously or negligently, trusted insiders can cause substantial damage to any organization. In fact, Insider Threat statistics show that two out of three incidents are caused by employee or contractor mistakes. Often, the best defense is a proactive Insider Threat management strategy that involves both cybersecurity awareness training, and ensuring that all employees or contractors thoroughly understand the policy. In circumstances where policies need to be adjusted, employees should feel comfortable approaching security teams to find the best possible solution to avoid risk.
Proofpoint's crowdsourced intelligence can also ensure that security teams are adapting and monitoring policies to protect against ever-changing Insider Threat tactics. Using this knowledge, organizations can be more proactive about addressing Insider Threats, and help equip their workforce to avoid common mistakes that can lead to Insider Threat incidents.
Want to see Proofpoint's Insider Threat Analytics solution in action? Take it for a spin in our demo (no downloads or installation required).