Costly Insider Attacks
The risk from insider attacks are highlighted this week by the well publicized San Francisco network admin who locked down the city's fiberWAN and also from the less noticed sentencing of a DBA for stealing and selling customer information. The problem with insider attacks isn't that there are more common than other attacks but the damage that is done in a single incident.
In the case of a Florida DBA who stole consumer information from Certegy Check Services Inc. and sold it to data brokers through a company he set up, the criminal netted over $500,000 for releasing up to 8.5 million records. He was recently sentenced to 57 months in prision and order to pay almost $4 million in restitution.
eWeek reports on a study from Verizon which found only 18% of its forensic investigations involved insiders. So the probability of an insider attack may be less than from other threats but the cost of a successful breach can be much higher.
Auditing and monitoring is a basic step to reducing the risk of insider attack. By the way, the DBA mentioned earlier was caught when a retailer using Certegy Check Services received calls from their check paying customers about unsolicited marketing calls and junk mail. The thefts might not have gone on for five years if more monitoring had been in place.
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