Risk No.1 – Human Nature
Whether with intent or without, people are the biggest threats to cyber security. These vulnerabilities come from employees, vendors, or anyone else who has access to your network or IT related systems.
On one hand, a cyber attack or data breach can occur simply because of human error or a lack of cyber security awareness, such as using easy to guess passwords or falling for phishing emails. They may simply have a moment of forgetfulness or may be tricked by an attacker’s effective targeted social engineering attack. Hackers frequently use social engineering tactics to hack without a code because they use other tactics to get information to get their victims to either provide the information they need or get them to engage with malicious content (such as malicious URLs)
Employees (and former employees) can be significant cyber security threats when they think they have something to gain through their malicious actions, perhaps they want to profit by selling or using the data they steal, or they may want to get revenge against an existing or former employer for some perceived injustice. So, they may install malware, download data, or perform other dire actions.
Whatever the reason, whomever is responsible, the results are the same. Data is stolen, your customers are compromised, and your company’s reputation takes a major hit. It’s a lose/lose situation for everyone except the perpetrator, one that likely could have been avoided by operating under the assumption that people are your biggest risk.
Recommended Solution
In addition to keeping strong firewalls and antivirus solutions in place, companies should use the services of an in house or third party cyber security operations center (CSOC) to stave off these types of cyber security threats for both their overall organizational cyber security as well as for their website. The benefit of this is that these individuals are dedicated to the monitoring and analysis of logs for your website, applications, systems to intervene at any sign of a threat and to swiftly remediate the threat.
Furthermore, limit employee access to sensitive systems using access management policies and procedures. Create and maintain a list of access to ensure that only the people who need access to your company’s databases or other systems have access.
