Insider Threat and Behavioural Monitoring Services | Microminder Cyber SecurityInsider Threat and Behavioural Monitoring Services

What is an Insider Threat

Insider Threat Management and Behavioural Monitoring Services

An insider threat is a risk posed by an individual within your organisation who may have access to networks, assets, data and sensitive information. These individuals may be:

Former employees
Current employees
Contractors
Business partners

An insider threat is a risk posed by an individual within your organisation who may have access to networks, assets, data and sensitive information. These individuals may be:

Former employees
Current employees
Contractors
Business partners

They maliciously aim to misuse their privilege or unwittingly disclose or misuse your organisation’s data and, as a result, damage your organisation's reputation or allow cyberattacks to invade your network.

Insider threats pose a significant risk as they are usually trusted individuals with various access levels. This can complicate catching an insider, as you will need to monitor unusual behaviour and traffic to identify the source of the threat. But because they also know your systems and controls, they may be able to bypass them and elude your cybersecurity team.

Read More +

Insider Threat Categories

There are three types of insider threats that you should watch out for, namely:

1
Malicious insider - Turncloak: This type of insider intentionally uses their credentials and access to launch a malicious insider attack. These could range from stealing sensitive information or data to extorting the company for financial gain. Also known as a Turncloak, they are especially dangerous as they have prior experience with your organisation’s security infrastructure and can target specific loopholes and vulnerabilities.

Read More +

Indicators of Insider Threats

As your go-to cybersecurity partner, Microminder watches out for suspicious or anomalous activities within your network as they are potential insider threat indicators. Some key indicators of insider threats include:

Excessive downloading of data that is divergent from your usual patterns should be a warning sign. We keep an eye out for data downloaded remotely or at odd times of the day.

Microminder is always on the lookout for unusual logins that happen at odd hours from unknown locations. We also check for username attempts that may warrant further investigation.

The more privileges a user has, the higher the risk they pose to your organisation. Our security team looks for a rise in users with enhanced privileges or attempts to acquire unauthorised privileges.

We monitor access to your critical applications, such as ERPs and CRMs, to ensure no unauthorised users gain access. Numerous attempts to access these systems are reasons to issue an alert and analyse these activities.

You should keep an eye out for employees whose behaviour changes from being a high performer to violating company policies. Also, watch out for comments about financial distress or a sudden rise in their financial status.

Techniques for Detecting an Insider Threat

Detection of insider threats requires both human and technological efforts. Microminder uses and recommends these four methods of detecting insider threats.

This method of insider threat detection looks for unusual or suspicious behaviour of users within your organisation. Microminder can provide cybersecurity solutions for behavioural monitoring in various ways, namely:

1
User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA): We perform managed behavioural monitoring to detect anomalies and issue threat alerts to security teams. Our security technicians also look for suspicious or unusual network behaviour within your organisation and your routers, servers and endpoints.
2
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): This cybersecurity technique collects data and event information to provide visibility into standard user patterns. When the system detects abnormal user behaviour, it alerts security personnel.

Read More +

Activity monitoring is one of the most common ways of identifying insider threats. Through user activity monitoring (UAM), our security experts can continuously monitor user activity within your organisation’s network. With automated UAM tools, the system sends real-time threat alerts to security officers as soon as a user violates a rule.

Using this proactive approach to insider threat mitigation, we actively look for indicators of compromise. This activity has a broader scope than cybersecurity assessment. It requires security teams to gather and analyse data such as results of risk assessments, logs of suspicious user activity, threat reports etc. Microminder utilises various AI-based cybersecurity technologies to perform threat-hunting activities. This ensures no opportunistic cyber attackers are lurking around your networks.

Your employees are one of the best resources for insider threat detection and identification. They can offer insight into changes in a fellow employee's behaviour, which may serve as warning signs. It would be best if you looked out for warning signs.

Behavioural Warning Signs

Expressing extreme job dissatisfaction or stress
Extreme changes in behaviour
Regularly spending time in the office after hours
Continual attempts to bypass security measures
Often being irritated or grumpy towards fellow employees
Sudden indiscipline and violation of company policies
Frequent comments about resigning or new, more lucrative job opportunities
Boasting about wealth and an abrupt lifestyle change

Read More +

How to Defend Against Insider Threats - Best Practices

When defending against insider threats, Microminder can perform the following activities to ensure you are not at risk of insider threats.

1
Conduct regular risk assessments to help your security teams fully understand the possibility of a cybersecurity insider threat.
2
Provide security awareness training — including insider threat awareness training — for all employees to create insider threat awareness.
3
Perform insider threat management activities by monitoring accounts of employees and stakeholders with network access.
4
Perform regular penetration tests — including threat awareness tests — to identify required security improvements to detect insider threat vulnerabilities.
5
Monitor our network and endpoints 24/7 to detect indicators of insider attacks.

We bring intelligence and mindset together.

Transform your cyber security strategy and make it your competitive advantage. Drive cost efficiency and seamlessly build a roadmap. Let’s do it right the first time!

Book a Discovery Call

Call 020 3336 7200

Client Testimonials

What our clients say about us

Clients in over 20 countries have secured their businesses from online threats with our cybersecurity services. Excellent customer support and cost-effective pricing are just a few of the reasons we’ve established long-lasting, highly successful relationships with our varied clients. Read our company testimonials to learn more about our unique capabilities and why so many clients have chosen us as their go-to provider for security solutions.

Claire Lee

Practice Manager - Amsel and Wilkins LLP

Microminder's in depth and broad scope pen testing truly provided us with some valuable insights that uncovered key business risks and highlighted necessary actionable intelligent changes that needed to be implemented within our business to combat any potential cyber-attacks from adversaries and prevent any breaches. This exercise helped us to enhance our cyber security posture and test our system’s resilience. We are quite pleased with our engagement with Microminder.

Julie Cockbill

Head of Operations - InfinityBlu dental

Microminder's 24/7 managed security services got deployed with such ease and immediately gave us an eagle eye view into our security logs and events, highlighting any indicators of compromise, effectively automated our response and correlated the incidents with full context, thereby triaging and eliminating all false positives. Our team are amazed at the speed and accuracy of Microminder’s Open XDR technology and skilled staff.

Tina Patel

Head of Integrations – Dental Beauty Partners

Our priority is business continuity and security, especially considering our operations across our 30+ practices. Microminder helped us with a tailored managed security services that aligned with our business needs. Their technology is at the forefront of the industry and that allows us to fully put our trust in their cyber security experts. We are glad to have Microminder as an extension of our technology team!

Philipp Mussbacher

Security Engineer & solutions consultant – Anonymous

Due to the fact that we work a lot with sensitive data in a business context, information security plays a big role for us. Due to the difficult labour market situation and the urgency to improve our security, we have chosen Microminder's CISO as a Service model and are very happy with it. Our virtual CISO manages to ensure stability and quality on the security side as well as legal requirements and compliance. I can only recommend Microminder's service.

Blogs & Resources

Discover our latest content and resources