ILMA Compoundings - July 2019 - 33

With that being said, there is a
risk of an employee with malicious
intent breaching your sensitive data,
whether it be to share sensitive details
to a competitor, profit from your
data or carry out revenge against your
company. If your company falls victim
of a malicious-intentioned employee,
finding out what happened is even
more difficult, because they often have
high-level system privileges that allow
them to erase their tracks.
If your company is one of the
unlucky ones where an insider deliberately caused a security breach, then
you are automatically in the highest
risk category of those susceptible to
cybercrime. The keys to mitigate this
risk are simple:
EDUCATE YOUR EMPLOYEES
* Establish a strong, mandatory
and frequent cybersecurity awareness training program for your
employees that clearly lays out
the policy for cybersecurity and
the consequences of violating
the policy.
* Don't allow employees to take
home devices that contain sensitive
files due to the risk of the device
being stolen or sensitive data being
transmitted over insecure networks
at their home or other locations.
* Instruct your employees to never
share their passwords.

KNOW YOUR PEOPLE
* Perform background checks
on your employees to assist in
identifying those who may take
deliberate actions that would
harm your company.
* Know which people have access
to the most sensitive data.
GUARD YOUR MOST
SENSITIVE DATA
* Limit your employees' ability
to obtain access (intentional
or unintentional) to sensitive
information via a least-privileged
approach to your data.
* Identify your most sensitive and
valuable data. Then assign that
data the highest safeguarding and
most persistent monitoring.
* Remove "local administrator privileges" from your users to their
company-provided laptops or
desktops. A "local administrator"
is someone who can do anything
he or she chooses to with a computer, such as install programs,
delete files, change sensitive
security settings and so on.
* Turning on "egress filtering" on
your network and limiting the use
of USB "thumb drives" will make
it harder for anyone to make copies of it and move them outside of
your organization.

ENSURE THAT YOU HAVE
FORENSICS AVAILABLE TO YOU
* Tracking down an internal cybercriminal requires logging of
network activity, especially for any
access to sensitive information.
* Any logs need to be stored in an
area that is limited to the fewest
number of employees as possible.
In short, your employees are your
most valuable asset but can also be
your greatest liability. They need to
be trained on best practices to keep
your data safe, and they also need to
understand that you have forensic
systems in place that will likely catch
them if they attempt to access data
they should not. A "trust but verify"
approach regarding employee access
to your critical intellectual property is
an important part of your company's
cybersecurity program.
Austin is the CEO of TCE
Strategy, an internationally
recognized speaker on emerging
technology and cybersecurity
issues, and author of Secure Enough? 20
Questions on Cybersecurity for Business Owners
and Executives. With over 10 years of experience
as a chief information officer and chief information
security officer, Austin actively advises companies
across a wide variety of industries on effective
methods to mitigate cyberthreats. For more
information, visit www.tcestrategy.com.

33
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