When an organization suffers a data breach or other anomalous incident, how does the news reach the world? We all know that the media and entertainment industry plays the key role here. But what happens if the media organization itself is affected? It’s time to understand cyber security concerns and challenges in this industry as well. 

The IT Security Paradigm

The Media & Entertainment industry nurtures a preconceived notion that this industry bears less risk of cyber threats. This lackadaisical attitude gives ample scope for cyber criminals to explore the vulnerabilities and breach data. A couple of years back, the ‘fame’ and ‘popularity’ of a global producer of movies and web series turned ‘ill-famed’ after their streaming service went live without the knowledge of the organization. The hackers actually compromised the site’s users by stealing their user credentials, changed all their passwords and logged off from all the devices to take control of the activities and huge amounts of data. 

Just before the pandemic hit the globe, this incident turned out to be an eye-opener for the global cyber security community. However, after multiple levels of scrutiny, the truth got revealed that entertainment companies have their own set of security challenges that were ‘ignored’. The hackers group found it luring and took the best advantage out of it by launching data breaches, creating data cloning, compromising user accounts, using impersonations and more.

The IT Risks

The entertainment industry has come a long way from electronic modes to digital modes where production houses migrate their broadcasting services towards online content and streaming services. As a result, the risk of hacking, data theft and potential damage of reputation increases daily. Here are some predominant IT security threats that can damage the organization beyond recovery.

Insider Threats: Insiders with easy and regular access to the ‘not-yet-released’ content bear the risk of leaking information to file-sharing servers. Most of the time, media companies lack any seamless user monitoring mechanism that increases the risks. When ‘trusted’ insiders remain involved in the malicious act, it invariably takes long to detect the malpractice or rather the source of it.

Cyber Sabotage: Group of hacktivists or organized cyber criminal groups attack media organizations to steal data, malign reputation and manipulate information of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, political idealism or simply spread baseless rumours. Organizations face real pain to deal with the consequences of such incidents.

Inadequate Public Scrutiny: Hundreds of public emails are inboxed in organizations’ official email everyday. It could be service feedback, service requests, complaints and more. In case of running contests, organizations check responses in the emails to decide the winners. Phishing threats loom large here. A potentially harmful email in disguise of an appreciation email could be disastrous if opened and clicked.

State-sponsored Threats: In order to stop spreading of controversial entertaining content, government-authorized ethical hacktivists compromise every access point. On several occasions, the media organizations face legal consequences as well in this regard and face financial and reputational setbacks.

Non-Compliance: The rules and regulations of global compliance standards are applicable to every industry including media and entertainment. Hence, in case of any data breach incident, the organization could surely be charged with non-compliance penalties. It raises financial stress and has adverse effects on the business future. 

Security Measures

Cyber security in the entertainment industry is crucial because a vast number of users are habituated today with online services. Hence, a robust IT security is the only key to stay above from the predominant cyber threats.

• A seamless monitoring of the end-users accounts round the clock can help the organizations to keep a track of who is accessing critical information at what time and for what purpose.
• Proper prioritization and segregation of data assets is highly critical. Along with that, determining the access control mechanism of every database as per rule and role can minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
• A robust mechanism to authorize and authenticate the user before allowing access is mandatory to ensure secure access.
• All the privileged set of identities that are gateways to most confidential information such as action plan for streaming services, upcoming productions etc. should have ‘Just-In-Time’ privilege policy to ensure privileged access only when it is required and not round the clock. It strengthens access control policy and protects confidential data.
• Following the global compliance mandates by following the best IT security practices can keep the organizations away from cyber threats.

Conclusion

As the media and entertainment sector grows to their digital potential and expands their online presence, it is highly recommended to protect their members, customers, partners and other associates and governing bodies. Today, it is one of the most profitable industries across the world provided it has the best IT security practices. Hence, organizations should invest time and money to strengthen cybersecurity and mitigate emerging IT risks.

Malicious insiders in disguise of genuine users, inadequate user authentication measures, poor password management policy are some of the loopholes in IT security, which is why compromised insiders often target enterprise confidential data. 

Here we have discussed three recent IT incidents where a Privilege Access Management solution would have averted data breach. 

Lack of authorization and monitoring: The challenge of insider threats has risen exponentially during the last two years due to changes in the work patterns. The hybrid work culture has made the situation riskier as employees and third-party users are managed both remotely and on-prem. This offers an opportunity for end-users with malicious intent to abuse or misuse the data. 

At the beginning of 2021, a large organization from the aviation industry in the Asia Pacific subcontinent suffered a data breach that involved details of thousands of passengers. A malicious insider turned out to be the culprit. 

Expansion of IT infrastructure leads to expansion of the threat surface and thus monitoring every end-user session is the only way to address insider threats. A robust PAM will not only ensure authorization of end-users including provisioning and deprovisioning of the users, but will also authenticate the end-users and monitor the session and raise the alerts if some anomalous activity happens.

Inadequate User Authentication: Authorizing and authenticating end-users before allowing access to the critical systems or applications has become very important for organizations having distributed IT infrastructure and hybrid work conditions. 

A government organization in the Indian subcontinent recently suffered data breach of thousands of applicants due to the absence of any user authentication mechanism. Such incidents not just put the individual identity privacy at stake but also maligns the reputation. 

Multi-factor authentication tool offered by a comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution ensures a secured access control mechanism for critical IT infrastructure. Multiple layers of user authentication become difficult for the hackers to circumvent the authentication process and thereby protects the data assets from unauthorized access. It eventually protects the business-critical data from misuse. 

Poor Password Management: Do we ever share our ATM passwords or internet banking passwords with others? In fact, banks always recommend that we change our passwords at regular intervals to ensure financial security. In large organizations where the business-critical applications, systems or databases are continuously and regularly accessed by multiple users, what extent of risks do they bear? 

Recently, in the middle of 2021, a nationalized bank in the Asia-Pacific region suffered data breach of millions of customers due to password hack. Industries like banking, telecom, government, healthcare and utilities are challenged by poor/ inadequate password management policy time and again. Almost 80% of data breach incidents happen due to poor privileged password management today. The vulnerability of passwords is more evident in a shared and distributed environment and is prone to compromise.

Password vault and frequent randomization of passwords, especially privileged passwords, helps to overcome the challenges of password breach. Deploying a mature Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution like ARCON | PAM automates the process of password randomization which is mandated by major regulatory standards. Not only that, the passwords are stored in a highly secured electronic vault and it helps in forensic analysis to understand who has done what to the passwords.

Conclusion

Digitalization is accepted and adopted by organizations globally to stay competitive with the advanced solutions. Simultaneously, organizations keep on striving with the emerging IT threats that challenge enterprise data security and data privacy every now and then. The above incidents vividly explain why Privilege Access Management solution (PAM) is an indispensable tool for small, midsize and large organizations in every industry. Deploy it and stay worry-free!

Organizations commit a grave mistake by limiting the user behavior analytics only to outsiders. External attackers are not the only ones responsible for causing cyberattacks. Research suggests that 60% of all cyberattacks are due to insider threats. 

User Behavior Analytics is a tool that can quickly detect behavioral anomalies and respond to potential insider threats on time to prevent such attacks. 

Why are Insider Attacks Dangerous?

Detecting insider threats can be challenging, such that many threats go overlooked for months or years. In a 2019 report on advanced threats, it has been concluded that insider threats go unnoticed due to the lack of visibility into the normal user behavior baseline and the management of privileged user accounts, and thus become an even more attractive target for cyberattacks. An average insider data breach can cost as much as 3.86 million dollars, according to a report. 

Insiders already have legitimate security access to vital credentials, which is what makes them hard to detect. Insiders already know where the sensitive data is stored and often have high-security clearance. For an insider threat, your system needs to detect when an employee shows signs of suspicious or abnormal behavior. But what is considered abnormal in one case might not be the same for others, which makes the detection even harder. Fortunately, user behavior analytics makes detection much easier. 

How Does User Behavior Analytics Work?

User Behavior Analytics or UBA refers to a segment of data analytics that offers essential insights about customers’ and prospects’ behavior while interacting online. UBA provides an exhaustive profile of the end users’ actions on the system.

User Behavior Analytics can be effectively applied to cybersecurity to differentiate between a major data breach and ward off a potential attack for enhancing conversions and revenue. 

Leveraging aggregated behavioral data, it is possible to determine common user behaviors. This data is used as the foundation of the analysis which eventually creates a user behavior profile. The more information the software can collect, the better the scope to identify behavioral anomalies. 

The software is programmed to collect data about the programs accessed, websites visited, locations, and others. All this data is further used to create a unique employee profile or baseline, which is always being monitored. 

How can User Behavior Analytics be Beneficial in Cybersecurity? 

User Behavior Analytics can be constantly used to monitor the activities of employees all the time. The integrated software is designed exclusively to compare data collected in each unique employee profile. 

Smarter security monitoring:

User Behavior Analytics can be applied to other segments of cybersecurity as well. It can monitor the users, assets as well as network. Not only for understanding baseline user behaviors, but the tool can also derive fundamental data about the actions of prospects and customers. Simultaneously, it can alert the admins to statistical anomalies and help mitigate business risks. 

Generates essential insights:

A vast amount of data leads to a better scope of comparison. By asking the right questions, these anomalies can be spotted on time. Anything outside the ‘normal behavior’ spectrum can be spotted as abnormal behavior, indicating the possibility of an insider threat. 

Correlates data across systems:

Correlating data maximizes the utility of User Behavior Analytics in network security, deriving a broader picture of what is occurring within the organization, identifying the anomaly proficiently while allowing the security and risk management team to understand what credentials have been compromised. 

Opportunities for Advanced Analytical Models

Leveraging unsupervised analytics for security operations adds value as it automates the overall hunting process. The discovery of anomalies can be more efficient, which can be later turned into supervised behavior analytics. 

Therefore, simply applying one facet of the analytics is never enough. The application should be made to all the levels – network, user, and assets – to determine threats quickly before any malicious activity goes into action. 

ARCON presents state-of-the-art technology specially designed to mitigate risks related to IT infrastructure. ARCON | User Behavior Analytics (UBA) offers an efficient framework for better visibility and robust protection, simultaneously providing insights about anomalies. The ARCON | User Behavior Analytics solution offers essential tools needed to spot anomalies, presenting the ability to trigger real-time alerts.

However, needless to say, once you give your money to the scammer, you will never get it back.

The scam began during the 1980s and has become quite renowned by now. Hence, the usage of the same procedure has become extremely rare in the 21st Century. Nonetheless, various refined variations of the scheme are still active and, plaguing the working-class community, like an incurable disease.

Hence, in this article, we will be going through the core definition of phishing. You will also find out detailed information regarding the tools that can assist you to avoid such scams.

Phishing: A Brief Preamble

Phishing is a segment of cybercrime that involves tricking people into performing a dodgy task. By doing so, the user may make their network system weaker and vulnerable to a well-structured cyberattack. For example, you may receive an email from an unknown sender who’ll ask you to perform a simple task in return for money.

The amount tends to be somewhat absurd. In most cases, after you complete the job, the sender will hack your network system or steal information.

According to a report published by the FBI, phishing is the most prevalent form of cybercrime performed in 2020. The study also mentioned that the number of victims was almost doubled in 2020 since the previous year (114,702 to 241,324 incidents).

Another report (provided by Verizon) stated that amongst the total numbers of attempted breaches in 2020, 43% were performed through phishing.

Although the phishing attempts seem practically illogical and devious, some of the well-written mails can certainly convince you. This was evident in the year 2020 when the USA-based organizations, experienced almost 74% successful attacks.

Nevertheless, if you are careful and have strong network security, you might be able to avoid even a well-structured attack altogether.

Types of Phishing

Phishing is usually used as an umbrella term to designate different cybercrimes with a strong sense of similarity. Here are some of them.

1. Smishing

A smishing attack generally involves a text message to get the attention of an individual. This type of SMS will contain a phone number or a link that may open the floodgate of the scamming attempts.

In some cases, the text message may also look like it is coming from your registered bank. In this aspect, the sender will ask you about your SSN, bank account number, etc.

Smishing is one of the most common types of phishing and has risen by almost 328% in the year 2020. So, it is essential for you to be wary about the same.

2. Whaling

Like smishing, whaling is also a type of targeted phishing, which goes after the more affluent organizations. Usually, a whaling attack is attempted on the CFO or CEO of a corporation or management business.

In a whaling email, you may get informed that your company is getting sued for some awkward reason. So, you’ll have to click on a link to get more details.

The link will take you to a separate page where you will be asked to provide crucial information like bank account number or tax ID.

3. Spear Phishing

Spear phishing, essentially, intends to scam a specific group of people, such as the system overseers, of a business. Unlike whaling, spear phishing emails will try to exploit your personal details. The information regarding the target is reportedly taken from social media.

A spear phishing mail can be categorized by detecting a sense of urgency. It may also relate to a task that goes against the norms of your organization.

The e-mail of the sender of a spear phishing mail tends to be spoofed. Therefore, you won’t be able to track back to the attacker in any way.

Although being a more target-specific segment, spear phishing is still pretty common. In 2020, almost 30% of phishing attacks were known to be done by following this procedure.

How Does Phishing Affect an Organization or a User?

A successful phishing attempt can affect your organization from several directions. Some of these are as follows –

• Overload the communications system and damage the servers severely
• Loss of crucial details, such as bank account number, SSN, and other related information
• Leak of consumer details or marketing strategies

How to Prevent Phishing?

Going through hundreds of spams and detecting anomaly can be quite irritating for an individual. So, it’s better to use a tool that can prevent the senders from sending these emails. Here are two security solutions that may help you out.

• UBA (User Behavior Analytics): With this tool, you can perform data profiling and find out malicious profiles on Gmail right away. Furthermore, it provides you with detailed insights on several anomalous profiles to keep you wary about them. Finally, it also has the capability of identifying anomalies on your server and detects them efficiently.
• EPM (Endpoint Privilege Management): EPM can provide you with an on-demand privilege system. Thus, the help-desk integration will be a lot easier. Due to the endpoint privilege, no unauthorizedperson can enter a classified area in the network. Moreover, it can also blacklist malicious applications and mails by detecting if they are a threat to your security or not.

Conclusion

Phishing, or any other form of cybercrime, has become extremely common throughout the world. Thus, it is imperative for you to use a specific tool that can help prevent such attacks and protect your organization’s network environment. Hopefully, implementing UBA and EPM in your system can be beneficial for your purpose.

Businesses, in particular, need to take drastic measures to prevent cybercrimes. Of all threats that pose harm to an organization, insider threats are considered the most dreadful. Unlike other security risks that occur from the outside of an organization, insider threats originate within the organization. The internal actors involved in malicious activities could be a board member, business partner, consultant, or a former employee. It doesn’t always mean that the individual must be a current member of the organization.

According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report generated in 2019, 34% of data breaches involved internal actors. So, it is a growing concern for businesses to keep their data protected not only from the outside entities but also from the internal entities.

No one can be trusted in this data-sensitive world. Businesses have to follow robust security measures and practices to keep their sensitive files away from any malicious employee. This is a highlight on insider threats and discusses on why it is a growing concern among organizations, and how to prevent them.

What are Insider Threats?

Insider threats are actually malicious behaviour by any vendor, an employee, an ex-employee, or even the janitor. Anyone who has valid access to confidential data files and network with malicious intention can be considered as an insider threat. The unfortunate reality about insider threats is that the people you trust with your systems and data are the ones responsible for them.

In other words, an insider threat can be seen as the potential of a company insider who had or has access to a company’s assets to use their access, either unintentionally or maliciously, to indulge in activities that could negatively impact the business.

Insider threat is also known as an insider attack as in some cases, the individual actually acts to compromise the organization’s computer system and network. Companies essentially focus more on tackling external threats, which makes them susceptible to insider threats. It could turn out to be a costly mistake if you disregard insider threats, leaving your sensitive information exposed. This is why it is vital that you understand different types of insider threats and what risks they pose so that you can develop a strategy to prevent or limit them altogether.

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Why is it risky for an organization?

Insider threats are the dangers inside the organization. They can be summarized in the following three drivers:

• Ignorance/ Accidental– Employees whose lack of awareness of procedures, protocols, and data security exposes external threats to the organization
• Negligent– Employees who weak approach to procedures, protocols, and data security exposes external threats to the organization
• Malicious Intent– Employees who intentionally exploit and misuse their privileges like special access to harm colleagues or company

Let’s understand the risks an enterprise could face due to insider threat with the following examples:

1. Multinational Bank: A malicious bank employee stole personal data and account information of 1 million users and provide them to a criminal organization
2. Global Beverage company: An insider stole a hard drive filled with information related to company secrets
3. Social Media: A malicious insider abuses his privilege to stalk women
4. Reputed Automobile company: A security engineer sabotaged the networks and systems and sold proprietary data to the competitors and third parties

These are enough to understand the risks associated with insider threats. To protect your employees, data, systems, and facilities, you must prioritize insider threats and it should be viewed as a shared responsibility among the teams. While you may not be able to prevent it from happening entirely, you can minimize its probability and manage the impact. For this, you will have to understand the types of insider threats.

Types of Insider Threats

While an insider threat strictly describes malicious behavior, there is a defined spectrum of insider threats. Insider threats vary significantly in intent, access level, awareness, and motivation, hence they are not all alike. With each of its types, there are several technical and traditional controls that you can take to bolster identification and prevention. According to Gartner, there are essentially four different types of insider threats. They are:

• Lone Wolf

As the name suggests, lone wolves prefer working independent. They act maliciously without any external manipulation and influence. If lone wolves have an elevated level of company privilege, they can be extremely dangerous. Job roles like DB admins and system administrators are highly likely to become insider threats. They should be monitored regularly regarding their activities. One perfect example of a lone wolf with Edward Snowden. He used his privilege to access classified systems and leaked information related to cyber espionage at the National Security Agency (NSA).

• Collaborator

A collaborator is someone who cooperates with third parties like competitors and uses their privilege to access information and provide it to the competitors. Such insider threats steal proprietary information, causing disruption to normal business operations. They do this for monetary gains as the third parties shower them lots of money just to provide them with insights. The insights could be anything from the audience demographics to product design, sales strategy, and more.

• Goof

Goofs are arrogant or ignorant users who do not act maliciously or show their intent but take potentially harmful choices. This type of insider threat believes it is exempt from security policies. It is surprising to know that the majority of insider accidents (about 90%) are caused by goofs. A goof can be a user or an employee who stores unencrypted personal information in a cloud storage account despite knowing that it is against the company’s security policy.

• Pawn

Pawns are users who are manipulated into doing malicious activities. In the majority of cases, pawns prove to be insider threats unintentionally via social engineering or spear phishing. An employee may download malware to their system or disclose important credentials to someone unimportant, and more. They do such things unintentionally, and this is why they are called pawns.

How to Prevent Insider Threats?

1. Monitor activity logs, emails, and files on your core data sources
2. Identify and determine where the sensitive files are stored
3. Find out who has access to particular files and data and who should truly have access to them
4. You are advised to establish and maintain a least privilege model within your business model
5. Apply security analytics and monitoring so that you are alerted on abnormal behaviors like increased file activity in sensitive folders
6. Educate and train your employees regarding the importance of data security

Conclusion

Insider threats are omnipresent. While you cannot completely eradicate it, you can take certain preventive measures to minimize the loss. The objective is to understand the security risks, both from outside or inside the organization. From implementing latest and advanced security measures to spreading more awareness among the employees about the new security protocol, being proactive and vigilant is the only way to prevent insider threats.

Overview

The total retail business of the e-commerce industry has been rising steadily during post-pandemic months. Both B2B and B2C segments of the e-commerce industries have observed almost double growth after WFH (Work from Home) became effective worldwide. Simultaneously, this has opened multiple doors of cyber risks. A recently India-based leading online food and grocery store suffered a massive data breach of more than 1 million of private customer details in an unfortunate incident. This has forced the victim to seek assistance from the cybercrime department to minimize the loss as much as possible. This incident prompted the other brands to boost their IT security policies and mechanisms to a satisfactory level.

Why is the risk increasing?

Cyber predators are sniffing treasures from the ecommerce industry during this new normal. While the entire globe is preferring to stay indoors and involved in virtual celebration, almost every individual is depending on online gifting for their nearer and dearer ones. To cash on this rare opportunity, the popular brands are adding extra inventories on their virtual shop to invite more footfalls. However, this boom has led cyber crooks to capitalize online IT security vulnerabilities There is a huge treasure trove hidden behind millions of user data, their personal details, financial details, payment transaction records etc. that are accumulated day in and out.

Identification and elimination of Insider risks

No organization would like to see their name in the cyber news headline due to wrong reasons. Most of the vulnerable areas of an e-commerce organization lie with the payment gateway systems and database management.

E-Retailers of course maintain a robust IT security. They have firewalls, IDS, Advanced Threat Detection and Response tools to keep malicious network traffic at bay.

Also, a mechanism to control Grant and Revoke access to elevated privileges (example MySQL Database) offers a policy-based access control.

However, it is definitely a herculean task to micromanage the user activities of the payment tracking team, database management team, promotional requirements/ marketing team every hour. And a lackadaisical IT security approach can surely result in data breach as unmonitored endpoints and end users pose significant IT threats.

Today identification of cyber threats has transformed into predictive approach rather than preventive measures. It requires monitoring of users’ behaviour patterns and reporting of the tasks performed. Today’s E-retailers require robust solutions such as ARCON Privileged Access Management and ARCON User Behavior Analytics

• Vulnerabilities of Financial Records:

The entire e-retail industry is standing on EPS (E-commerce Payment Systems) to ensure smooth business operations. It authorizes the transfer of funds between buyers and sellers and allows the e-commerce portal to place a request for money from a customer’s bank against the products they have purchased. After a successful transaction, the merchant needs to keep a record of it because in case of refunds, the seller needs to return the amount to the same buyer. These transaction records are stored in highly critical systems which are accessed by users with elevated rights.

To ensure a secured and successful EPS system, end users with privileged rights require continuous monitoring to keep a track of who is accessing which account for what purpose and when. Ideally, malicious insiders are the biggest threat to organizations where access to critical systems is not happening on a “need-to-know” and “need-to-do” basis. Occasionally, (especially during festive hours) extra workforce is brought into action to manage over-burdened regular tasks and many are granted elevated rights temporarily. However, risk aggravates if the rights are not revoked even after the tasks are completed.

ARCON | PAM overcomes these challenges by allowing access only on a “need-to-know” and “need-to-do” basis. With the permission of the IT administrator, the user is granted access on a granular control basis including the now widely adopted method,   “Just-in-time Privilege” to restrict the duration of the activities. Moreover, the solution improves the overall access control mechanism through session monitoring and reporting.

ARCON | PAM solution helps e-retailers to continuously monitor all user activities including privileged tasks. A live dashboard displaying all user activities enables the admins to keep an eye on privileged sessions and identify malicious activities instantly.

• Data Privacy

It is said that data security is the biggest hurdle in the growth of e-commerce. Why? In spite of having sophisticated network security solutions, organizations often fail to ensure legitimate traffic on the Web servers. As a result, they face multiple security threats. Programs that run on a server possess higher potential to malign databases, terminate server software or make unexpected changes in the information if those are malicious in nature. But equally threatening is anomalous end user behavior activities. Identification of risky behaviour profiles and detection of anomalous IT profiles is highly crucial to ensure data security. A stringent and relevant IT security policy can make sure that organization’s IT operations are safe and as per expectation. Poor or lackadaisical policies as to end points and end-users can never ensure a safe IT environment even if there are the best security technologies.

ARCON | UBA enables IT administrators to configure baseline activities on machines as per the centralized policy and identifies users who are deviating from the baseline policies. The advanced and unified enterprise data analytics identifies user-activities based on daily use cases and allows access only if the user has authorization or privileged entitlements.

• Security of Critical Credentials:

From an individual user’s perspective, a strong password secures him/ her from breach of his/ her digital privacy. Furthermore, to strengthen the security, we keep on changing the passwords on regular intervals. Similarly, an e-retailer, at an enterprise scale, needs to secure the sensitive login credentials of all the elevated admin accounts (privileged accounts). Malicious actors might be in disguise among hundreds of insiders, third-party vendors or even business partners (in case of joint ventures) who are frequently logging into those systems for various tasks or purposes. The number of privileged accounts are piling on day by day with the expansion of IT infrastructure. Keeping the business model of the e-commerce industry in mind, even just adding a serviceable city in the list, widens the security gap if adequate measures are not taken by the organization.

ARCON | PAM with the help of a robust Password Vault engine helps organizations to frequently randomize and change passwords credentials automatically. It is hundred times more advantageous over manual control of critical passwords and holds the key to prevent any malefactor in the network periphery.

Conclusion

Every organization, especially in the ecommerce industry, is prioritizing privacy control and IT security infrastructure to ensure best secured services to the customers. Some stray IT and insider incidents put a big question mark on data privacy. The most advanced and best-in-class solutions like ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) and ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) can ensure data security and data integrity of E-Retailers.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

Indeed, today cyberspace has become a new grey market. Information – be it personal details, card details, social media passwords among many other forms of confidential data – sales in the web as data/confidential information is traded like a new commodity. In this data-driven age every organization possess and process a vast amount of data which is targeted by external/ internal malefactors.

A spate of recent incidents has brought to the forefront an urgent need for securing information assets.

Recently, a popular mobile App, that helps in identifying unknown mobile number details globally, allegedly suffered data theft of 140 million Indian users. Though the company denied this allegation, it has been found that the stolen data was sold in dark web for INR 1.5 lakhs which is equivalent to almost 2000 Euros. The price of global users went as high as 25000 Euros. Apart from this incident, a leading American service provider of title insurance and mortgage settlement services, leaked millions of title insurance records in the recent past. Almost 885 million files got exposed due to this breach and they were exposed to thousands of users who did not require any authentication to log in and access the information.

Data protection requires robust Information Security mechanism. With the number of digital identities rising exponentially in digitized era, it is imperative to lay a foundation for strong Identity & Access control systems and implement best privileged account practices. As organizations migrate IT workloads to IaaS platforms and manage data in distributed IT environments, controlling and monitoring IT users and privileged users is critical to protect data.

Most of the sensitive and confidential information in organizations are accessed through privileged accounts. Despite the proven fact that most of the data breach incidents happen due to compromise of privileged accounts, it is highly surprising that organizations are still not providing adequate security to protect data.

With Privileged Access Management, enterprise data receives a solid security shield, no matter where the data is stored, on-prem, in-cloud, MSP, or hybrid environments – enterprises can ensure data integrity as every access to critical systems is authorized, authenticated and documented.

The Bottom-line: To prevent critical business information from being stolen and sold in the open web space, it is highly imperative for global organizations to adopt adequate security measures. In addition to advanced perimeter controls, seamless monitoring and controlling of critical systems is a must to mitigate looming data breach threats.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

As the wave of digitization sweeps across the nation, it is terribly crucial for the organizations, irrespective of large or small, to take adequate security measures for protecting their huge amount of data generated every day from various sources. The CISOs, CTOs and CSOs are ceaselessly on their toes to curb the chances of any hack or data breach incident that might push them towards big irrevocable losses. This scenario of insider threats is considered to be one of the most sinister reasons for digital disaster.

Identification of Insider Threats

The implications of insider threats largely go to the administrators and other privileged users, who are commonly

identified as the most suitable position holders who can both suffer and carry out numerous malicious activities stealthily. Their mistakes or negligence have the most severe effects. These malefactors are normally followed by contractors, consultants or even temporary workers, whose loyalty are questioned most of the time.

Precisely, insider threats take familiar forms, but the effects are augmented because they come from within and have smooth access to the organization’s official network along with sensitive credentials. Moreover, lack of data protection strategies by the management also forces them to chalk out plans sitting within the network. The best protection however can be a strong organizational focus on network/ data security basics.

Reasons of Insider Threat/ How to reduce the chances

There are several insider threat vulnerabilities that are mostly ignored in organizations.

1. BYOD process
The abundance of BYOD/ CYOD policy inherits the risk of cyber threats. The organizations do require thoughtful and comprehensive approach towards implementation of this policy. There has to be a detailed possibility assessment of whether BYOD implementation is feasible in the organization, depending on the type of industry. The employees should be trained repeatedly to make them avoid the risks of public Wi-Fi with a VPN or hotspot, and minimize the risk of lost information by keeping confidential business files in a secured cloud and not in personal devices. In this process, privilege access management plays a key role in securing the data.

2. Recruitment
Insider threats can be tackled from the recruitment process itself. The HR leaders should have thorough background checks, and pry into the prospect’s history to assess susceptibility to bribery or unfaithfulness. This can be done by scrutinizing credit history of the candidate or any debts that could be used as leverage.

3. Lack of management visibility
It is surprising to see how few organizations have little or zero visibility when it comes to network monitoring practice. However, when it comes to insider threats, organizations normally lack the ability to be sceptical or even withstand suspicious user behaviour and file movement. While chalking out a proactive insider threat plan, the CISOs, CTOs and CSOs need to be clear about the amount of network visibility in the organization. Now there are technologies like Privilege Access Management that can establish baseline activity control for users, monitor for anomalies, or even automate relevant actions. Thus it’s just wise to take advantage of the ability to be aware of what is going on in the business network.

The sly insider threats can originate on numerous fronts, and monitoring them can be a daunting task. Meeting the challenges of information security requires stringent organization policies to cultivate values and invest in Privilege Access Management (PAM) to support that value. After all, the privileged identities hold the master-keys to an organization’s network of devices and databases.

4. Leadership
The CISOs, CTOs and CSOs mirror the security management in organizations. Their strategic decision making right on time drives the organization towards a secured network periphery. Nevertheless, securing an organization requires alertness and co-operation from the entire team and not just the CSO or CIO. Cyber security policies are often considered as barriers towards progress of any organization. Unfortunately, securing an organization against insider threats requires utter cautiousness from the entire leadership team, and not just the CSO.

In a nutshell, insider threats are one of the burning issues in the cyber world. Recently, a London law firm has confirmed that the number of High Court cases in which crucial corporate data has been stolen by ex-employees or disgruntled employees has increased by 25% annually. The malicious insiders deliberately breached customer and client databases, confidential financial information and more. The ubiquity of smart phones has made it quite simpler without raising any suspicion.

ARCON provides state-of-the-art technology aimed at mitigating information systems related risks. The company’s Privileged Identity Management / Privileged Access Management solution enables blocking unauthorized access to ‘privileged identities’, while its Secured Configuration Management solution helps to comply with Governance, Risks, and Compliance (GRC) requirements .

Need a solution for safeguarding critical IT assets? Please contact us.

In a world where data breaches are quickly becoming commonplace, even the best security technology in the world can’t help your organization to protect itself from security breaches unless your employees understand their roles and responsibilities in safeguarding sensitive data and protecting company resources.

In 2014, we learned the hard way that people are the biggest security problem we have today. In most cases, breaches occurred when an employee or third party gained access to the organization’s internal IT systems access privileges.

The Vodafone and Telstra breach in late 2011 began when parties outside the control of internal IT security obtained credentials to access the organization’s internal IT systems. Business users have more access than ever before to the critical data and services they need to do their jobs, and we can leverage this empowerment to engage them in ensuring the security of our most sensitive organizational assets. Said another way, it is precisely due to this unprecedented level of access to sensitive information that privileged users should be considered the first line of defense for our critical corporate assets.

An effective employee cyber security education should contain information about the most prevalent attack methods and actors of the current threat environment. In 2014, the expanding IT infrastructure that gives users easy access to sensitive data and services means that if a necessary security solution model is not implemented access to key organizational data can be accessed without any scrutiny. As an example of how internal user data is targeted, Trend highlighted that Ransomware became a bigger and more sophisticated threat across regions and segments, and unlike older variants no longer involved simply issuing empty threats but actually encrypting files.

For example, training employees and key vendors in the use of Phishing email identification could have prevented the devastating Carbanak breach where hackers sent emails containing a malware program to hundreds of bank employees from different banks, hoping to infect administrative computers. Employing a Privileged Identity Management framework as part of an enterprise security model where all administrative access is monitored could potentially have highlighted these breaches a lot sooner.

In order for employees and the organization to truly benefit from cyber security education and for it to be embraced throughout the organization, cyber security education should be conducted frequently and made mandatory; but more importantly, easy to access and available on-demand.

Training employees is a critical element of security and the key to successfully implementing cyber security within the organization is to ensure the business user is seen as an extension of the security team. Only then can the impact of internally targeted data breaches affecting an organization be minimized and potentially avoided.

About ARCON
ARCON is a leading technology company specializing in risk control solutions. ARCON offers a proprietary unified governance framework, which addresses risk across various technology platforms. ARCON in the last one decade has been at the forefront of innovations in risk control solutions, with its roots strongly entranced in identifying business risk across industries it is in a unique position to react with innovative solutions/products.

Learn more about us at https://www.arconnet.com

A BIG hole in Identity Management
The last decade has seen several debates on Identity Management and the best possible ways to address the growing disconnect in the much interconnected world. While there has been substantial efforts in managing the identities of an organization either with manual processes or recently by implementing IDM technologies, there has been a glaring hole in the approach as most of the identity management solutions are not able to address the challenges posed by privileged accounts.

Privileged accounts such as those of the administrators, allow users to log on and control systems/applications and have unrestricted access to view, alter or extract data/information on those systems. Most organizations have multiple workstations, servers, routers, databases, scripts and applications that require administrative privileges. There are scenarios, where-in many organizations have hundreds or even thousands of privileged accounts and passwords, interestingly in most of the cases, the number of these accounts are more than the end-user accounts. This is further made complex as the passwords of these accounts are mostly shared amongst the limited technical support staff.

If one were to look at the recent security breaches, wherein systems have been hacked and data has been compromised or modified for example: money balance in accounts (saving accounts, debit cards etc). It is abundantly clear that all external/ internal attackers eventually try to acquire access to the privileged accounts. The risk categorization is HIGH, typically for any industry which has business sensitive data and/or customer information.

Insider threat being the biggest challenge, regulators across the world are now demanding granular access controls on the privileged accounts with comprehensive tamper proof logs. References can be found in various standards/guidances. This is pushing beyond the outer boundaries of many existing privilege identity solutions/ technologies, which have only session recording capabilities.

The selection of such evolving technologies is generally a challenge and more so in the case of technologies which encompass the entire IT ecosystem. The critical components of a PAM solution that one needs to carefully assess includes the following:

• The PAM solution must have Plug-n-Play connectors for Operating Systems, Databases, Network devices and Applications.
• The PAM(Privileged Account Management) solution must have Plug-n-Play connectors for Operating Systems, Databases, Network devices and Applications.
• The Password Management module should be robust to ensure that all dependencies like service accounts, task, scripts etc. are systematically managed.
• Solutions having the ability to capture commands should be considered. This would also enhance the capability to provide real time alerts and analytics.
• Flexibility is the key requirement for the IT support staff, thus the solution should not only provide ease of access to the target systems but also ensure that there is no undue overheads for the technical staff. Thus scalability, high availability and ease of deployment is an important aspect.

Source:- This article was also featured in the Secure Magazine 2013 IT Security Edition.

Authored by Nirma Varma – Associate Director

About ARCON
ARCON is a leading technology company specializing in risk control solutions. ARCON offers a proprietary unified governance framework, which addresses risk across various technology platforms. ARCON in the last one decade has been at the forefront of innovations in risk control solutions, with its roots strongly entranced in identifying business risk across industries it is in a unique position to react with innovative solutions/products.

Learn more about us at arconnet.com