The New Insider Threat

It’s not a new threat really. People inside an organization can always be a threat. It’s just that many people, some of them prominent security professionals, have been downplaying the insider threat lately in order to hype other emerging threats. I’m of the opinion that we’ll see insider threats rise through the year and probably into next. As the economy worsens, people who are becoming financially stressed may turn to corporate crime, or may retaliate for being laid off.

Prime example, news this week of a former Fannie Mae contractor leaving a malicious script designed to wipe out thousands of computers after he was fired for…a scripting error he made earlier in the month. Luckily they stumbled upon the script before it was set to execute. They might not have been so lucky though. Bruce Schneier has some good tips about reducing the threat trusted individuals can pose.

In the end, you can take several measures to reduce your insider risk but you can never eliminate it entirely. At the end of the day the weakest link always comes down to people. People are sometimes dishonest, it’s simply a fact of life. Luckily for the rest of us, they seem to be a pretty small minority.