Don't become the next insider threat statistic

I would never make disparaging comments about my wife, especially since she’s smarter than me and has a lot more letters after her name than I do, but she’s driving me crazy with the weather. Ever since she discovered the weather forecast websites, she browses to about 10 of them and tells me what they’re predicting about the weather. And usually while they’re predicting sunshine, it’s pouring rain and she’s asking me why they’ve got it wrong and what does it mean that there’s a 70% chance of something happening! She’s the one with the fancy degree, so why is she asking me?

In fact, I’m bombarded by stats every day. I’ve just discovered that 25% of drivers using satellite navigation have driven down a one way street. But I digress. We're all bombarded with stats every day and we simply take them for granted. We believe them. Of course there are a few folks out there who have started to fight back at the “statmongerers,� demanding to know where the stats come from. I don’t have any stats about how many are actually doing this, but probably 99% of us have something better to do!

Over the past couple of years, there has been an endless stream of stats, including from yours truly, about the insider threat and yet the vast majority of IT security officers appear to be oblivious to them. So here’s a stat that I guarantee will not be disputed. Right now there is a 100% chance that some organization is the victim of either malicious activity by a member of their IT staff or the stupidity of one this elite group.

Forget the stats and just look at the news. Take today’s headline from The Boston Globe, for example. “Ex-Intel worker accused in theft.� In the past few months, we’ve had instances in San Francisco, San Diego, Lichtenstein, and a host of other instances of IT staff abusing their privileges. In these and many other cases, the problem is ultimately due to a lack of control and proper process within the organization. According to the Burton Group, “Privileged accounts can bypass most internal controls to access confidential information and cause denial of service attacks either by deleting data or rendering applications inoperable. In many cases, unauthorized users can use privileged accounts to cover their tracks by destroying audit data.�

In the case in San Diego, an IT specialist had deliberately deleted patient and allied data from his former employer's computer systems. He now has five years to reflect on his actions but the damage is done. In San Francisco, a computer network administrator for the Department of Technology tampered with the network, which contains the city’s sensitive data, and created an administrative password that gave him exclusive administrative access.

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