Inside the Insider

Three Coca-Cola employees were charged with stealing confidential information and samples of a new drink in hope of selling them to competitor PepsiCo Inc. Pepsi reported the incident and worked with Coca-Cola and authorities to investigate it.

Coke’s chief executive, Neville Isdell said that the breach “…underscores the responsibility we each have to be vigilant in protecting our trade secrets. Information is the lifeblood of the company.”

While we seem to be inundated with reports of data breaches similar to the Coca-Cola example above, we may not know the full extent of the problem. More than 80 percent of our clients have experienced at least one and possibly more unreported insider-related security breaches within their organisation.

Would you know if your email administrator or any one of your privileged IT staff was regularly reading your email and that of other staff such as the CEO? Well I can assure you that our experience shows that this kind of practice goes on undetected in seven out of ten organisations that we monitor.

Lack of resources and leadership makes it difficult to address the insider threat. Speaking with our clients we have found out that the number one barrier to addressing this risk is lack of sufficient resources, followed by lack of leadership and finally ownership of managing insider threats.

In most cases the CEO does not even believe the insider threat is serious, while in contrast the IT and security staff believes that it should be taken seriously.

Insiders have two things that external attackers don’t: privileged access and trust. This allows them to bypass preventative measures, access mission-critical assets, and conduct malicious acts all while flying under the radar unless a strong incident detection solution is in place.

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