95% of cyber security breaches are due to human error[1]. It could be you. The best bit? You probably won’t even know you’re doing something wrong. You have inadvertently just become an unintentional insider threat.
What’s an unintentional insider threat?
A person becomes an unintentional insider threat when they unwittingly allow a cyber attacker to achieve their goal – whether that’s a data breach, access to systems, or diverting payments to a criminal’s account. This can be through negligence or lack of knowledge, but can also be a result of just doing your everyday job.
Unintentional insider threats are particularly dangerous because the traditional methods of identifying insider threats don’t work – they don’t try to hide emails or files, because as far as they’re aware, they’re not doing anything wrong. If an attacker presents themselves as a legitimate person with the right credentials to request a change, the unsuspecting employee will probably respond exactly as the attacker was hoping.
Trusted employees have access to company-sensitive information, assets, and intellectual property; as well as permission to make financial transactions – often without requiring any further approval. Threat actors target these privileged, trusted people – impersonating suppliers, regulators, and known colleagues – and try to encourage them to do something they have permission to do, but shouldn’t.
“Staff authorised to access sensitive information, manage financial assets, or administer IT systems will be of greater interest to an attacker (and may be the target of a sophisticated spear phishing campaign)." [2]
Why are these threats so prevalent?
Email allows threat actors to communicate with users with almost no defensive barriers between them. Even the most diligent employee gets distracted, rushed, or slightly too tired, which is all it takes for a malicious email to achieve its objective – whether that’s clicking a link, opening an attachment, or trusting the email’s source enough to reply. You don’t expect to be attacked in your safe office environment – threat actors prey on this perceived safety, to catch you off your guard and socially engineer you into doing something you shouldn’t.
Payment diversion fraud is a well-known method of attack, where adversaries pose convincingly as an existing supplier, and request your trusted, authorised employee to change their payment details due to a security incident, or other such urgent, yet credible, situation. This type of fraud doesn’t always happen over email either – phone calls, letters, and even faxes can be used by attackers, in an attempt to avoid detection.
We all know what a spam email looks like, but 97% of people are unable to identify a sophisticated phishing email[3]. This is hardly surprising when you consider that there are, comparatively, so few highly-convincing fake emails – because you don’t see them every day, you’re not always looking out for them. Then there are some methods of impersonation you can’t realistically be expected to detect – for example, spotting the difference between a 1, l, and I (1, L, and i, respectively). Attackers know you’re not meticulously scanning every email for tiny details like this, so they take advantage. Read our blog post on CEO fraud, which covers impersonation like this in more depth. If your email security currently relies on users correctly identifying malicious emails 100% of the time, your defences are going to succumb to attack.
But how can you prevent the unintended?
90% of organisations feel vulnerable to insider attacks[4]. Monitoring normal access and behaviour patterns can give early warning signs of potential intentionally malicious activity, but the same can’t be said for unintentional insider threats. The attacker’s request could be comfortably within the scope of your daily duties.
The information available to users is often insufficient for them to determine whether an email is legitimate. As such, you should be suspicious and challenge requests, especially if they’re unexpected or urgent. Checks should also be put in place for a second pair of eyes to confirm certain requests before any action is taken, for example, changing payment details or making unscheduled wire transfers. If the request is for a financial transaction or asks for sensitive or personal information, phone the person who made the request (or better still, speak to them face-to-face) to confirm it’s genuine.
If you’re ever in doubt, following best cyber security practice is always a good place to start. But there’s only so much humans can do…
PERNIX scans every inbound email to detect what humans can’t. Our clear traffic light banner provides the information you need to make an informed decision about an email’s nature and legitimacy before acting on it, making it easy to avoid becoming yet another unintentional insider threat.
Ready to address your email security? Speak to an expert
Phishing attacks are the most common cause of unintentional insider threats, and have been one of the top methods of cyber attack for the last eight years[5] – it’s time to take a more proactive and technological approach to your email defence. PERNIX is simple to install and provides immediate protection, without costly or complicated setup. Curious about the difference it can make? Get in touch with our experts to find out.
Footnotes
More CORVID blog posts
An introduction to cybersecurity for decision-makers
Cybersecurity is an industry, a field of academia, a buzz-word, a science, an art and a bogeyman. And whilst cybersecurity cannot be avoided within any organisation that relies upon computers and data: there needs to be a way by which senior decision-makers can be involved in, and make decisions on, cybersecurity matters.
Cybersecurity is a highly specialised subject. It is complex and requires significant of knowledge and experience that is different from normal IT-knowledge. Knowing jargon and buzzwords does not mean that someone is an expert so always check the credentials of your “trusted advisors”.
Despite its overuse as a term, cybersecurity is fundamentally about protecting computer systems and data.
There are rules
Most territories now have laws around Data Privacy and many industries have regulations around information security. These must always be complied with and, irrespective of whether they are useful, they are necessary to operate in specific sectors.
Whilst the regulatory requirements may originate from the best of intentions: it is likely that organisations will need to do additional things to have the right type of cybersecurity for their specific profile and operations.
Why does anyone need cybersecurity?
Questioning why cybersecurity is needed is a good starting-point as it helps anchor solutions and initiatives to the fundamental driver behind activity in this space.
- The more you rely on (take advantage of) IT, therefore
- The bigger an impact to the organisation if something goes wrong, therefore
- The more you need cybersecurity
Cybersecurity needs to be seen as an enabler to using IT. Without cybersecurity, reliance upon IT is an incredibly risky thing to do. In-fact, one of the oldest risk equations in InfoSec (Information Security) works as follows:
Threat[1] x Impact[2] x Opportunity (Vulnerability)[3] = RISK
In mathematics if anything is multiplied by zero then the answer is zero. If there were no Threats there would be no Risk. If there was no Impact there would be no Risk and if there was no Opportunity to compromise a system there would be no Risk.
There are formal methodologies to measure the level of risk to an organisation as a result of a computer security breach. Sometimes formal assessments are useful to help shine a light on the scale of the issue. But if you are not required to undertake them then, in most cases, there is little benefit in going down this route.
Cybersecurity is a cost and, like other costs, it should be managed. For many organisations this means that the goal is to spend as little as possible on cybersecurity whilst having a proportionate level of protection considering the risk. Getting that proportionality right can be a challenge. Cybersecurity is routinely both a victim to underspending, where there is a lack of appreciation of the subject, and a cause of overspending, where the expenditure has not been objective focussed and consequently failed to achieve a useful outcome.
There are three fundamentals that an organisation needs to do regarding cybersecurity:
- Prevent an incident from occurring[4] – not all incidents can be prevented
- Detect an incident that has occurred – anti-virus cannot detect all incidents
- Respond well to an incident that has occurred – a good response can negate the impact of an incident
There may be exceptions to the above; but in-general all cybersecurity expenditure should be aligned to at least one of those three. Therefore, mapping initiatives against them can be a useful activity. Combining this with an articulation of effectiveness (a metric is best) is useful as it helps focus the initiative on the right outcomes for the organisation. At the risk of repetition: remember that cybersecurity is highly specialised. It requires specialist tools in the hands of specialist practitioners. Whilst an organisation could build their own Security Operations Centre (SOC), the question of “why?” should be raised. A company could generate its own electricity: but why would it do so?
Cyber expenditure almost always consists of both:
- Anticipated expenditure – the cost of the tool, service or technology
- Additional impact – specialist and (or) additional people, extra-training, recruitment, facilities and a distraction from core business
The following matrix (with a made-up example) is provided to help characterise cybersecurity initiatives. It is intended to be completed quickly, on the back of a post-it note, to help rapidly focus attention on the nature of the investment and whether the benefit, costs and approach have been considered. It is not intended to replace a full-investment case.
Final notes
No matter how much is spent on cybersecurity, and no matter what you are told, no company or product can guarantee safety. All anyone can do is make it less likely that an organisation will be compromised or reduce the impact of compromise. The inverse, i.e. not spending any money on cybersecurity, does not guarantee that an organisation will suffer a security breach. Not every organisation gets hit and some organisations are lucky. However, a strategy requiring luck is not recommended.
Whilst cybersecurity should be on the agenda: it should not monopolise it. Cybersecurity should be frictionless and, ideally, left to the professionals who should take the pain of it away. If cybersecurity is routinely causing you pain it is worth asking whether it is being managed as well as it could be.
Footnotes
[1] “Threat” refers to the groups or persons who do the attacking: Hackers, Nation States, Hacktivists. The entities that undertake the attack.
[2] Impact is not just the confidentiality breach of information. Depending on the circumstances, availability or integrity compromises can be highly impactful.
“Impact” is the impact to your organisation if they succeed in stealing, destroying, changing or making your systems and data unavailable.
[3] “Opportunity (Vulnerability)” is a measure of how accessible the systems and data are to attackers. Very secure government systems are not directly connected to the Internet and this reduces the Opportunity of attack considerably.
[4] Attackers have access to all the same technology that the defenders have and despite the prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus (both of which are much needed by the way), they are still able to breach organisations security and gain access to systems and data. Prevention is better than cure, but it’s just not practical to rely solely on this element.
Patching up life support: why critical care is at critical risk
Keeping people alive is unquestionably more important than patching software, but unpatched software is vulnerable to exploitation, and won’t keep anyone alive if it leads to a breach of your IT systems, rendering them unavailable.
After WannaCry exploited unpatched Windows XP vulnerabilities and cost the NHS £92m, healthcare providers across the country carried out a mass upgrade to Windows 10. Making the move to the newer OS is synonymous with increased security (you’d be worried if it wasn’t…), but there is growing concern that it was seen as a tick box, one-off exercise. Now the OS that was exploited is no longer in use, healthcare providers feel safer. This is a dangerously complacent assumption – new vulnerabilities are identified almost daily, creating an ‘arms race’ between attackers and vendors; one looking to exploit the other looking to get patches out.
The issue is further compounded as not all systems made it to Windows 10 – legacy IT systems remain where the service they provide can only run on the legacy OS. This particular stumbling block can make the health sector an easier target. Cyber attackers aren’t renowned for being a particularly moral bunch, so if they can shut down a hospital’s life support system and demand a hefty a ransom to get it back up and running again, they’ll take that payday without a second thought as to the consequences.
Let’s not forget that despite its wealth of valuable confidential data, the healthcare sector isn’t always necessarily the prime target for cyber criminals.
In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, certain threat actor groups have claimed they won’t be targeting healthcare providers, but can’t rule out accidentally compromising systems if they’re not patched properly. Without a robust patch management programme in place, the sector can easily become an unintentional casualty of cyber attackers looking to exploit any vulnerabilities in any business. Just look at WannaCry.
The NHS is the nation’s beating heart, and healthcare providers know better than anyone that a beating heart stopping is a very bad thing. You can’t fix vulnerabilities you don’t know about, but you can guarantee threat actors will find them. You need full visibility of where your IT estate’s weaknesses are, and clear guidance on how to fix them. Even if you’re not a target, an unpatched infrastructure leaves you open to exploitation by opportunistic cyber attackers and widespread malware campaigns.
We’d like to offer all healthcare providers a free introductory scoping call to discuss how CORVID can help you identify and patch vulnerabilities and strengthen your cyber defences. Simply let us know what time is best for you, and we’ll do the rest.
