Internal Security Threats

By Accident

Even your best employee with no ill-intentions can become a threat to your organization if they are not educated on how to handle company data/hardware. Employees need to know how to upload/share their work without the data being at risk. They also need to know how to navigate the web without downloading malware or falling susceptible to phishing attacks. Read more here on educating your employees on security awareness

Employee betrayal

Obviously no company wants to hire untrustworthy employees, but if your company has valuable/secret data and one of your employees can benefit from leaking this data, don’t think that they won’t. One way to reduce this risk is by keeping data on a need-to-know basis. Every employee should ONLY have access to what information they need to complete their job function. Email filtering and data loss prevention should also be enabled to monitor employee’s email. These can be setup to check for specific keywords if you suspect employees to be leaking company data. Mobile Device Management is extremely valuable in an IT department and should be installed for all laptops and phones that are holding, or have access to valuable data

Monitor your security tools and train employees

If you have any of the mentioned tools/software (email filtering, mobile device management, DLP, etc.) implemented at your company, you must take the time to monitor and refine these tools. No software will do all of the work for you – once tools are setup, make sure you have the time/resources/workers required to monitor and tweak the configurations as needed. Company-wide security training also needs to be regularly updated to keep up with a perpetually changing security landscape.

Here’s Karen – she’s your best employee, but she just logged on to a public WiFi and accidentally gave hackers full access to her company laptop. Oops – now your entire business is at risk!

Educate your employees!