Busting Insider Threats with Data Activity Monitoring

Organizations everywhere are neck-deep in data. Whether it’s created by internal operations or customer-generated, your company needs to be on top of every piece of data that they are creating, using, and storing. However, this is much more easily said than done, and the majority of organizations do not have adequate data visibility or comprehensive records for their information. If your company has imperfect knowledge of what data you have and where it is stored, you are at risk for security and compliance issues.

Data Activity Monitoring solutions can help by keeping tabs on your data and how it is used for you. Compliance regulations are tightening, and data breaches are getting more expensive and more common every year. Minimizing your risk of noncompliance fines and ransomware means monitoring and controlling access to your data. To do that, you need to know who can access your data, what typical access patterns and activity look like, and when unusual activity occurs. Keeping up manually is nearly impossible, but automated activity monitoring can get you the information you need without bogging you down.

What is Data Activity Monitoring?

Data Activity Monitoring (DAM) is an automated tool used to monitor data access and typical activity patterns within your environment. A well-designed DAM tool has several other functions, including data discovery and classification, vulnerability assessments, and compliance reports. Ultimately, the goal of a DAM tool is to help you ensure that your data can only be accessed by authorized users for appropriate purposes and to alert you when anomalies occur.

Especially for companies with remote employees, a large number of people access tons of data every day. DAM keeps all of the information collected so that you can reference a record during an audit or following an alert of suspicious activity. When an employee accesses data improperly, you receive an alert, and a record of the incident is made, which can help you pinpoint security flaws and address potential insider threats.

How DAM Helps with Insider Threat Detection

Although many organizations focus on securing their infrastructure and addressing vulnerabilities that could be exploited by external attackers, they often neglect an equally nefarious threat. Insiders can pose just as much of a threat to company security as a high-risk code exploit, and they are responsible for the majority of security incidents for companies. While insider threats are not always (or often) malicious, insufficient training and poor protocol adherence can lead to data breaches, ransomware, and other attacks.

Insiders already have access to an organization’s systems and data, so they are prime targets for attackers. Additionally, it is often easier to crack someone’s ten year-old password than to go looking for weaknesses in a web application’s code. Alternatively, an attacker might choose to use social engineering attacks or phishing to ensnare your employees, and it could be highly effective if you haven’t trained your employees to expect the attack strategy and respond appropriately.

Data Activity Monitoring can’t completely eliminate insider threats, but it can significantly reduce your risk of a security breach and help you find the threat quickly. As with any other security threat, a fast response time is the key to minimizing both damage to your business and recovery costs. DAM helps security teams quickly detect data breaches by identifying unusual uses of data, such as attempted exfiltration. Logins from unusual locations and unexpected permissions changes will also be flagged.

Managing the Insider Threat to Data

DAM solutions provide required visibility into data flows and identify anomalies within your databases. Anomalies come in many forms, but automated alerts will help you address unusual patterns or activities. They also monitor access and activity within your environment, discovering and categorizing the data, keeping records for audits, and alerting you to data use policy violations. All of these functions contribute to effective mitigation of insider threats, and they are essential for efficient threat management.

Good DAM tools should provide a central database with all of your organization’s information, eliminating data silos and blind spots. Since most organizations have hybrid environments, the tool you choose should work on both your hardware and your cloud databases to provide a unified picture of your organization’s activity.

Although DAM solutions are highly effective at their tasks, it’s important to actively manage insider threats in other ways as well. Training employees is essential. DAM will flag an employee who breaks security policies or accesses unauthorized data, but it can’t teach them better security practices. DAM will immediately detect an instance of someone using administrative credentials from an unfamiliar device, but it can’t stop employees from improperly storing their credentials and inadvertently making them vulnerable to compromise.

While you shouldn’t neglect other preventative measures, DAM solutions can greatly reduce your risk of a data security incident or compliance violation by verifying that your data is stored properly and effectively protected from unauthorized access. Implementing DAM will help you effectively monitor your data, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks and leaves you vulnerable.