Despite the ongoing rise in social engineering attacks, the idea that cybersecurity is only about technology manifests within most of our minds. Organizations often neglect human behavior's impact on their cybersecurity postures. Instead, they spend lavishly on endpoint security tools, threat hunting programs, and building incident response plans. Admittedly, these security measures are a crucial part of mitigating attacks.
As National Insider Threat Awareness Month draws to a close, Egnyte is taking this opportunity to reinforce everyday best practices that companies like yours need to follow. The goal of the month is to educate U.S. government and industry leaders about the risks of insider threats and how to effectively address them.
Apart from external attackers, organizations need to consider another type of threat when planning their cybersecurity strategy: insider threats. There are different types of insiders. On the one hand, there are people who have secret knowledge and unintentionally create risk openings within an organization; and on the other, there are others who intend to cause harm, motivated by profit, extortion, or personal grievance. This means insiders can be classified as follows.
People have become the primary attack vector for cyber attackers around the world. As the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2022 indicates, it is humans rather than technology that now represent the greatest risk to organizations. According to the SANS 2022 Security Awareness Report, the top three security risks that security professionals are concerned about are phishing, business email compromise (BEC) and ransomware, all closely related to human behavior.
Perhaps someone doesn’t answer a Slack message as quickly as they should, or they have long hours blocked on their calendar. Maybe someone doesn’t seem motivated during team meetings or they are slow to complete work. While research has shown that overall, productivity has actually increased as a result of the work-from-home movement, managers know all too well what it’s like to be suspicious that someone is taking advantage of their new work arrangement.
