What is Inside View Vulnerability and How Can You Prevent It?

ByDaniel Gottilla

anti-virus software, denial of service attacks, vulnerability management, vulnerability management development, vulnerability management program, vulnerability scanning tools

What is Inside View Vulnerability and How Can You Prevent It?

Inside view vulnerability is the risk your company faces from an employee or an insider to the company attacking your system. Businesses tend to trust their employees implicitly, and while most of them deserve this trust, there are a few things you can do to help reduce your risk of an inside attack.

The most common culprit is the disgruntled employee. These inside jobs are usually not very sophisticated, and are often performed by employees who do not have system administrator status. They can still do plenty of damage, so it’s important to limit the amount of access any one employee has to ensure that they can only access data and resources that specifically apply to their job. Some of the more common ploys are stealing data to sell to outside parties, or the less harmful, but still unconscionable, peeking into employee records to look at their salaries. Your inside view vulnerability may also surface through unintentional risk-taking, such as taking work home. If the employee loses the files or laptop, it is your proprietary data out in the world, not to mention a huge security risk for the clients who have put their trust in you.

Terminated employees are another risk. They may be angry, and it’s important to minimize the amount of damage they can do on their way out. Be sure that all access for these employees is immediately terminated, and regularly change all passwords and logins company-wide. The employee’s access may have been removed, but if they know another employee’s login information, that’s another route into your system.

Sometimes the person attacking with insider knowledge is, or was, a system administrator. If you find that someone has uploaded spyware or is infiltrating your network illicitly, take that computer offline immediately. If you find even one piece of malware, it’s likely there are more. Back-up your data files and reinstall your system from the original disks and also change the root password. It’s a hassle, but it’s better to take action now than to worry about what could be coming next.

What can you do to reduce your inside view vulnerability?

• Familiarize yourself with insider threat research.
• Regularly revisit your security protocols to make sure that your security is up-to-date, and is also being properly implemented.
• Run background checks on your employees. As many as one-third of inside hackers have criminal records!
• Plan in advance how to mitigate the damage if there is an inside attack.
• Educate your managers about the risks so they can be aware.

You can reduce the amount of inside view vulnerability you have. Taking the time to tighten security loopholes and to plan how to handle an attack can make the difference between a large loss and the ability to mitigate the damage and keep your company running smoothly.