Slashdot Mirror
Insider Threat
Ben Rothke writes "Thousands of computer security books have been published that deal with every conceivable security issue and technology. But Insider Threat is one of the first to deal with one of the most significant threats to an organizations, namely that of the trusted insider. The problem is that within information technology, many users have far too much access and trust than they should truly have." Read the rest of Ben's review.
Insider Threat
author
Eric Cole and Sandra Ring
pages
397
publisher
Syngress
rating
9
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
1597490482
summary
Excellent overview of the insider threat to networks and information systems
The retail and gambling sectors have long understood the danger of the insider threat and have built their security frameworks to protect against both the insider and the outsider. Shoplifters are a huge bane to the retail industry, exceeded only by thefts from internal employees behind the registers. The cameras and guards in casinos are looking at both those in front of and behind the gambling tables. Casinos understand quite well that when an employee is spending 40 hours a week at their location dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars; over time, they will learn where the vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. For a minority of these insiders, they will commit fraud, which is invariably much worse than any activity an outsider could alone carry out.
Insider Threat is mainly a book of real-life events that detail how the insider threat is a problem that affects every organization in every industry. In story after story, the book details how trusted employees will find weaknesses in systems in order to carry out financial or political attacks against their employers. It is the responsibility to the organization to ensure that their infrastructure is designed to detect these insiders and their systems resilient enough to defend against them. This is clearly not a trivial task.
The authors note that the crux of the problem is that many organizations tend to think that once they hire an employee or contractor, that the person is now part of a trusted group of dedicated and loyal employees. Given that many organizations don't perform background checks on their prospective employees, they are placing a significant level of trust in people they barely know. While the vast majority of employees can be trusted and are honest, the danger of the insider threat is that it is the proverbial bad apple that can take down the entire tree. The book details numerous stories of how a single bad employee has caused a company to go out of business.
Part of the problem with the insider threat is that since companies are oblivious to it, they do not have a framework in place to determine when it is happening, and to deal with it when it occurs. With that, when the insider attack does occur, which it invariably will, companies have to scramble to recover. Many times, they are simply unable to recover, as the book details in the cases of Omega Engineering and Barings Bank.
The premise of Insider Threat is that companies that don't have a proactive plan to deal with insider threats will ultimately be a victim of insider threats. The 10 chapters in the book expand on this and provide analysis to each scenario described.
Chapter 1 defines what exactly insider threats are and provides a number of ways to prevent insider threats. The authors note that there is no silver bullet solution or single thing that can be done to prevent and insider threat. The only way to do this is via a comprehensive program that must be developed within the framework of the information security group. Fortunately, all of these things are part of a basic information security program including fundamental topics like security awareness, separation and rotation of duties, least privilege to systems, logging and auditing, and more.
The irony of all of the solutions suggested in chapter one is that not a single one of them is rocket science. All of them are security 101 and don't require any sort of expensive software or hardware. Part of this bitter irony is that companies are oblivious to these insider threats and will spend huge amounts of money to protect against the proverbial evil hacker, being oblivious to the nefarious accounts receivable clerk in the back office that is draining the coffers.
One example the book provides is that many companies feel they are safe because they encrypt data. An excellent idea detailed in chapter two is to set up a sniffer and examine the traffic on the internal network to ensure that the data is indeed encrypted. The reliance on encryption will not work if it is not setup or configured correctly. The only way to know with certainty is to test it and see how it is transmitted over the wire. Many companies will be surprised that data that should be unreadable is being transmitted in the clear.
Some of the suggestions that authors propose will likely ruffle some feathers. Ideas such as restricting Internet, email, IM and web access to a limited number of users may sound absurd to some. But unless there is a compelling business need for a user to have these technologies, they should be prohibited. Not only will the insider threat threshold be lowered, productivity will likely increase also.
The author's also suggest prohibiting iPods or similar devices in a corporate environment. The same device that can store gigabytes of music can also be used to illicitly transfer gigabytes of corporate data.
Insider Threat provides verifiable stories from every industry and sector, be it commercial or government. The challenge of dealing with the insider threat is that it requires most organizations to completely rethink the way they relate to security. It is a challenge that many organizations would prefer to remain obvious to, given the uncomfortable nature of the insider threat. But given that the threats are only getting worse, ignoring them is inviting peril.
The only lacking of the book is that even though it provides a number of countermeasures and suggestions, they are someone scattered and written in an unstructured way. It is hoped that the authors will write a follow-up book that details a thorough methodology and framework for dealing with the insider threat.
Overall, Insider Threat is an important work that should be required reading for every information security professional and technology manager. The issue of the insider threat is real and only getter worse. Those that choose to ignore it are only inviting disaster. Those companies that will put office supplies and coffee under double-lock and key, while doing nothing to contain the insider threat are simply misguided and putting their organization at risk.
Insider Threat is a wake-up call that should revive anyone who doubts the insider threat.
Ben Rothke, CISSP is a New York City based security consultant and the author of Computer Security 20 Things Every Employee Should Know (McGraw-Hill 2006) and can be reached at ben@rothke.com"
You can purchase Insider Threat from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The retail and gambling sectors have long understood the danger of the insider threat and have built their security frameworks to protect against both the insider and the outsider. Shoplifters are a huge bane to the retail industry, exceeded only by thefts from internal employees behind the registers. The cameras and guards in casinos are looking at both those in front of and behind the gambling tables. Casinos understand quite well that when an employee is spending 40 hours a week at their location dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars; over time, they will learn where the vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. For a minority of these insiders, they will commit fraud, which is invariably much worse than any activity an outsider could alone carry out.
Insider Threat is mainly a book of real-life events that detail how the insider threat is a problem that affects every organization in every industry. In story after story, the book details how trusted employees will find weaknesses in systems in order to carry out financial or political attacks against their employers. It is the responsibility to the organization to ensure that their infrastructure is designed to detect these insiders and their systems resilient enough to defend against them. This is clearly not a trivial task.
The authors note that the crux of the problem is that many organizations tend to think that once they hire an employee or contractor, that the person is now part of a trusted group of dedicated and loyal employees. Given that many organizations don't perform background checks on their prospective employees, they are placing a significant level of trust in people they barely know. While the vast majority of employees can be trusted and are honest, the danger of the insider threat is that it is the proverbial bad apple that can take down the entire tree. The book details numerous stories of how a single bad employee has caused a company to go out of business.
Part of the problem with the insider threat is that since companies are oblivious to it, they do not have a framework in place to determine when it is happening, and to deal with it when it occurs. With that, when the insider attack does occur, which it invariably will, companies have to scramble to recover. Many times, they are simply unable to recover, as the book details in the cases of Omega Engineering and Barings Bank.
The premise of Insider Threat is that companies that don't have a proactive plan to deal with insider threats will ultimately be a victim of insider threats. The 10 chapters in the book expand on this and provide analysis to each scenario described.
Chapter 1 defines what exactly insider threats are and provides a number of ways to prevent insider threats. The authors note that there is no silver bullet solution or single thing that can be done to prevent and insider threat. The only way to do this is via a comprehensive program that must be developed within the framework of the information security group. Fortunately, all of these things are part of a basic information security program including fundamental topics like security awareness, separation and rotation of duties, least privilege to systems, logging and auditing, and more.
The irony of all of the solutions suggested in chapter one is that not a single one of them is rocket science. All of them are security 101 and don't require any sort of expensive software or hardware. Part of this bitter irony is that companies are oblivious to these insider threats and will spend huge amounts of money to protect against the proverbial evil hacker, being oblivious to the nefarious accounts receivable clerk in the back office that is draining the coffers.
One example the book provides is that many companies feel they are safe because they encrypt data. An excellent idea detailed in chapter two is to set up a sniffer and examine the traffic on the internal network to ensure that the data is indeed encrypted. The reliance on encryption will not work if it is not setup or configured correctly. The only way to know with certainty is to test it and see how it is transmitted over the wire. Many companies will be surprised that data that should be unreadable is being transmitted in the clear.
Some of the suggestions that authors propose will likely ruffle some feathers. Ideas such as restricting Internet, email, IM and web access to a limited number of users may sound absurd to some. But unless there is a compelling business need for a user to have these technologies, they should be prohibited. Not only will the insider threat threshold be lowered, productivity will likely increase also.
The author's also suggest prohibiting iPods or similar devices in a corporate environment. The same device that can store gigabytes of music can also be used to illicitly transfer gigabytes of corporate data.
Insider Threat provides verifiable stories from every industry and sector, be it commercial or government. The challenge of dealing with the insider threat is that it requires most organizations to completely rethink the way they relate to security. It is a challenge that many organizations would prefer to remain obvious to, given the uncomfortable nature of the insider threat. But given that the threats are only getting worse, ignoring them is inviting peril.
The only lacking of the book is that even though it provides a number of countermeasures and suggestions, they are someone scattered and written in an unstructured way. It is hoped that the authors will write a follow-up book that details a thorough methodology and framework for dealing with the insider threat.
Overall, Insider Threat is an important work that should be required reading for every information security professional and technology manager. The issue of the insider threat is real and only getter worse. Those that choose to ignore it are only inviting disaster. Those companies that will put office supplies and coffee under double-lock and key, while doing nothing to contain the insider threat are simply misguided and putting their organization at risk.
Insider Threat is a wake-up call that should revive anyone who doubts the insider threat.
Ben Rothke, CISSP is a New York City based security consultant and the author of Computer Security 20 Things Every Employee Should Know (McGraw-Hill 2006) and can be reached at ben@rothke.com"
You can purchase Insider Threat from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Another problem I've seen is execs granting themselves and their assistants way more access than they really need to do their job. It's a power issue for some of them. I run the company and should be able to get to anything.
That's not every company and SOX has made thinking about the consequences more attractive for the higher ups.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I hate books like this. Management reads stuff like this and starts making it difficult for employees to get any work done. Worse yet is if they start trying to take away the IT department's power. In every environment I've ever worked in, I've EARNED the trust of my fellow geeks and been given access gradually. I dont abuse it. A good IT department never fully trusts anyone. I never fully expect to be trusted. These kinds of books just complicate that delicate geek balance.
is that I would want access in case, for whatever reason, I had to throw the admin out the door and get someone else to his job.
A good security policy protects admnistrators too... if something happens you will be less likely to get blamed for something you didn't do.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
This sounds bogus to me.
I doubt many companies are "oblivious" to the insider threat, it's just considered an acceptable cost of doing business. For example, a grocery store I used to work at knew perfectly well that their employees were lifting candy from the bulk candy dispenser (to pick an example). But they also knew the money they lost on that was significantly less than the cost of installing cameras and paying someone to review the tapes, or than the cost in lost sales of eliminating the bulk candy dispenser. So, when someone was caught red-handed, they were read the riot act (at least) or outright fired (at worst), but no special effort was made to catch people.
I don't think the owners of that grocery store were business prodigies, either. My guess is that the same sort of logic applies to most employers: the cost of preventing the infraction is higher than the cost of allowing it. The truth of this is reflected in which industries do protect themselves against the "insider threat": places like casinos, where a successfully criminal insider could lose them huge quantities of money.
Meanwhile, the book seems to make the same suggestion a lot of security experts do: if a user doesn't need the technology, then don't let them use it. This sounds good, but it carries costs, too. First, of course, the cost of setting up and maintaining a network that enforces such policies. But second, the cost in employee morale, which cannot be discounted. Another job I had not all that long ago was in an office that didn't allow its employees to listen to talk radio. Music was fine, but talk radio was too much of a distraction. Since you didn't need it to do your job, you weren't allowed to have it.
The effect on morale was, to put it mildly, negative. Honestly, it's one of the reasons I didn't have the job for very long. Email and internet access are similar: employees have become accustomed, rightly or wrongly, to some personal use of these technologies. Take that away, and you're sure to end up with disgruntled employees, no matter how rational your reasons.
Moreover, it's a question of trust. If you demonstrate to all your employees that you don't trust them, odds are good you'll increase the number of employees who will live up (or down, if you prefer) to your expectation. At best, you'll incur the costs associated with high turnover rates. At worst, you'll fall victim to even more pernicious crime than you otherwise might have.
I guess the point is, it's not necessarily ignorance or even apathy that causes businesses to be vulnerable to insiders, it's simple cost/benefit analysis.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Its VERY common to seperate the administrative tasks of purchasing and renewing maintenance agreements away from engineering.
I'm trying to figure out if you're attempting to be sarcastic in places or not, but I'm still not quite sure.
The keys need to be held by only a small group of people. "Too many cooks spoil the soup" applies very well to a corporate network, even down to the workstation configuration. It's possible to screw up the whole enchilada from that point too, ore at least have some major negative effect, and it's much better that if the intent is for it to be a managed network for it to be managed, dammit. If not, it's a free-for-all.
Many of my users are very smart people. Unfortunately, they're good only with their own home PCs. They don't understand why we don't always do things the same way that they themselves do them, nor will they until they come to appreciate the demands that present themselves in trying to keep a 30,000 computer network up and functioning for everyone despite their different needs. Where I work, our network is supported by ten field and bench technicians, two data cabling technicians, two telephone system technicians, and four helpdesk persons as far as interface-with-the-user support is concerned. Our back end is four network engineers, four software specialists, one AS/400 administrator, two Computer Operators, and a slew of programmers to write the software that the users will do their jobs with. It's a very, very small department given the size of the organization, and if we had better, tighter control over the security of the workstations it'd be a much easier job.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
'IT' needs access to do its job. We need *total* access to all systems and data or we cant be effective and might as well not goto work.
Anyone that stands in the way of this should be fired.
If you cant trust your IT people with this access, then they should be fired.
As far as the owner having total access, well its his f-ing place. HIS butt is on the line.. He gets what he wants, always. Deal with it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One of the wisest comments I've heard on security was: security is the tax that the rest of us pay because some people are immoral.
Security has a definite cost. Casinos are probably the extreme example. They tend to hire people paid an hourly wage who handle large amounts of money. Perhaps they have little choice but to watch them all them time. The people who are working at the casino are generally willing to put up with a total surveilance work environment because the jobs pay better than most relatively unskilled jobs.
I have not read the book that was reviewed, but the reviewer seems to sugget that something like this kind of total surveilance environment is desirable. The problem is that such an environment exacts a cost from the majority of honest and moral people in the hope that it will deter or catch those who are dishonest. A heavily restricted surveilance environment is likely to drive anyway many people who have other job options. As espionage scandels have shown, there is never any guarantee that any set of counter measures will assure that someone does not betray trust.
There has to always be a balance between risk and the cost of the security measures. Security "professional" like the reviewer seem to forget this. After all, it is not their problem when people quit for a more pleasant environment or when the organization cannot attract highly qualified people who can choose to work elsewhere.
After 5-plus years at my current position, I've been looking at possibly moving on. And I am amazed at how many companies now require "background checks", including access to one's financial and credit history over the course of one's employment. All for the sake of "trustworthyness" and verifying "lack of exploitablity".
I always refuse to sign. First of all, trustworthyness can be verified by current (who knows I'm looking) and previous employers. They're called references for a reason.
Second, no company has a need-to-know regarding my--or anyone else's--financial and credit history.
This is some of the most sensitive information people have, to just release to unknown individuals within a company. Before people state that companies are seeing me--and others--in the same way, see my previous point about "references".
Besides, if the applicant is married, the company does not have the authorization to search the spouse's information. And the spouse may be the exploitable person--via drinking, gambling, drugs, overspending, etc. Or the kids. Or the parents. Or the siblings. Getting the picture?
People just need to refuse to sign these forms, and wish the companies good luck finding someone. Of course, they're likely chasing away the very people who understand security.
Chalk it up to lazy HR people and further attempts at control.
A Better solution is to do the following:
- Hire good employees, who are relatively honest and straightforward people. This includes everyone -- IT, Sales, Administrative, etc. If they arent honest, they shouldnt be working here. (This also tends to help with Corporate Responsibility -- how NOT to fudge the books in a crunch..) There are decent HR personality tests that can reasonably predict if someone would be untrustworthy in different situations.
- Deal with your employees fairly, honestly, and be upfront. This will minimize the biggest source of insider problems -- disgruntled employees. For example, giving yourself a raise after or just before laying off other employees, is generally a Bad Thing (tm). Try to be honest with employees about their performance, what is expected, and what wont fly. Provide regular, upfront feedback. Follow through with action. Be Kind, Understanding, but Firm.
- Trust your employees to make sound decisions. The employee who is berated and treated as if they "cant be trusted" will eventually turn into the employee who you fear them to be. If you dont trust them to start, then why should they care? More over, if you dont trust them, why did you hire them?
- Give people ample access to what they need, but not so much access that it impedes others. For example, the IT administrator should have access to quite a bit. Asking for a password to do their job is no only unefficient, its demeaning and downright stupid. Do you trust the IT people you have hired? Do you believe them to be competent? If so, then let them do their job. If not, then why did you hire them or why are they still working there? Its incredibly frustrating to employees to do what this book reccomends -- lock down access. Its frustrating to the employee becuase they have to "ask" to do their job. And its frustrating to management, who has to constantly hand-hold entering passwords as the employee progresses. Cut the leash.
Overall, I think its important for IT security people and Management to understand these risks. TO watch for violations. But to base your company security policies on these type of ideas would be lunacy, and would kill any sort of company morale you might have had going for you. Its much easier to trust the people you work for, pay them fairly and well, and treat them like human beings than it is to try to lock them down in every way to "prevent" bad things.
Certainly there are exceptions where even the very small percentage of bad employees can cause very large damage to the company. This should be dealt with appropriately within those industries -- and employees should know this DURING the application process, so they know what kind of BigBrother situation they are getting into.
B