Insider Threats and the difficulty in stopping data breaches

In dealing with today’s digital-threats, the main focus of companies, is by far on preventing attacks emanating from outside the organization.

Businesses invest fortunes on bolstering their digital defenses with ‘traditional’ tools such as firewalls and antivirus programs. Current estimates put the average number of these expenditures at above $10 million for the medium to large size firm.

With all the hype on protecting the network from threats from without, threats from within usually get left by the wayside. But this is only to the industry’s detriment.

The Full Scope of the Insider Threat

According to the latest research, over half of all database breaches involve a company insider. The challenge for administrators when it comes to these threats is that they don’t present themselves as dangers to the network.  The truth is, insider threats come in many forms. The more benign types include the careless worker who inadvertently leaks company information.  But insider threats can also come in more malicious forms like the third party agent actively seeking to steal data, or even a disgruntled employee seeking revenge for perceived mistreatment.  This latter category makes up some 47 percent of all insider-linked breaches.

Furthermore, major events in the company–such as mergers or other restructurings–only exacerbate the risk of insiders exposing data, inadvertently or intentionally.

As awareness of the insider threat has grown, the industry has been scrambling to produce solutions to combat it.  Most however involve complex (not to mention expensive) regimens of countermeasures and defense strategies.  While some of these protocols are vital to any stable organization (employee screening, identity access management), they all come up short when addressing the insider threat as a whole.   In fact many of these ‘solutions’ are barely solutions at all, but rather postmortem methods for cleaning up after a breach has already taken place.

The Proactive Solution

So instead of using methods which are merely reactions to data loss, why not use a solution that can actually prevent it?

GTB Data Protection that Works^tm solutions offers complete data discovery, monitoring, detection, and prevention with a virtual zero-false-positive detection rate, thus offering full transparency for managers and an all-encompassing protection for the network.

With the high accuracy and efficiency of GTB’s data protection technology, companies can stop data breaches / exfiltration on the very first day of deploying the system.