[ISN] Slacker or hacker?

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 22:24:01 PST


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/06/insider_threat/

By Bryan Betts
6th February 2007

The vast majority of insider IT sabotage is carried out by employees - 
or ex-employees - who have already showed signs of concerning behaviour 
such as tardiness, truancy, arguing with colleagues, and poor job 
performance, according to US researchers.

According to the research - which ought to worry anyone who has 
difficulty getting into the office on time - 80 per cent of the insider 
attacks studied were carried out by people who were already known to be 
disgruntled, but were poorly or ineffectively dealt with by their 
managers or employers.

The findings come from a five-year insider threat study by researchers 
from Carnegie-Mellon University's CERT Coordination Centre and the US 
Secret Service, and recently published as updated advice for the wary [1].

The study looked at 49 cases where IT systems had been damaged by a 
disgruntled current or former staffer. The costs of these attacks, which 
ranged from logic bombs to financial fraud, allegedly ranged from $500 
to tens of millions of dollars.

According to the CERT team, 92 per cent of insider attacks followed "a 
negative work-related event", such as a dispute, demotion or transfer, 
or being fired - 59 per cent of the saboteurs had already been sacked, 
and either got into their former employer's systems remotely, using 
passwords that hadn't been deleted, or had already used their privileged 
system access to set up the attack before they were thrown out.

The report's authors noted that "86 per cent of the insiders held 
technical positions. 90 per cent of them were granted system 
administrator or privileged system access when hired by the 
organisation".

They said that the most important things organisations must do to 
protect themselves are to thoroughly terminate system access when an 
employee leaves, carry out account audits to see who has access to what, 
and watch out for unhappy staff - perhaps increasing the monitoring of 
an employee's online activity if they seem disgruntled following one of 
those negative work-related events (and who wouldn't be?).

However, they add that managers are also likely to be at fault if an 
insider attack occurs, citing factors such as access management 
practices that degrade over time due to competing priorities, tension 
between staff and management, and ineffective management responses to 
problem behaviour.

[1] http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/CommonSenseInsiderThreatsV2.1-1-070118.pdf


______________________________________
Subscribe to the InfoSec News RSS Feed
http://www.infosecnews.org/isn.rss



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Feb 06 2007 - 22:29:53 PST