Insider Threat Prevention & Detection Powered by Behavior Analytics
Protect sensitive and confidential company data from loss caused by accidental, negligent or compromised insiders with insider threat prevention fueled by data-driven endpoint monitoring.
Insider Threat Prevention For Every Type of Business
No business, enterprise or SMB,
is immune to insider threats.
Teramind’s analytics, automated incident response and contextual user monitoring data strengthen cybersecurity, and provide security teams with enriched data to identify malicious insiders.
To detect and prevent them, organizations need proactive and modern solutions that supplement traditional cybersecurity tools.
Capabilities
Prevent Insider Threats
Prevent all types of insider threats and data loss caused by insiders.
Teramind is capable of detecting insider threats and preventing them before they happen through its Behavior Rules & Alerts engine.
- Get alerted to anomalous and malicious behaviors indicative of an oncoming attack or data breach.
- Limit how company data and files are handled to prevent accidental or intentional data leaks.
- Protect your systems from malware by preventing users from falling vulnerable to phishing campaigns.
- Keep an eye on those who have the most access with access control policies for privileged users.
Detect Attacks in Real-time
Detect and thwart attacks in the moment with real-time threat prevention.
Automated & customizable responses built into Teramind stop insider threats and alert admins before an attack happens.
- Monitor and block email transport activities that indicate data exfiltration.
- Prohibit file uploads to anywhere including public cloud and external USB drives.
- Shut users out after-hours or when logging in from unknown sources and IP addresses.
- Intercept suspicious email activity like unprotected data sharing.
Predict Oncoming Threats
Predict oncoming threats with intelligent risk assessment.
Use dynamic risk scoring to gain insights into user behavior and prevent insider threats and other potential security risks before they become critical issues.
- See all risky activity in a single dashboard and identify the organization’s biggest security risks.
- Find out if users’ risk is persistent or escalating to address growing threats to the system.
- Identify vulnerable or targeted areas based on what, when and where risky user behaviors are happening.
- Uncover anomalous, deviating behaviors indicative of insider threats.
Conduct Detailed Investigations
Conduct detailed investigations and collect irrefutable evidence.
Perform detailed forensic investigations with Teramind’s forensics features like session playback and OCR to find out exactly what happened during a breach.
- See detailed timelines of user and administrative actions in immutable logs that can be used as forensic evidence.
- Watch what happened leading up to and following a rule violation or alert.
- Find stealthy activity hidden inside unstructured data with high-speed OCR search that locates unstructured content.
- Pinpoint the exact moment and location a data breach occurred with comprehensive activity reports.
Try Platform
With a Live Demo
to see how it works.
Try Platform
With a Live Demo
to see how it works.
Insider Threat
Detection FAQs
What’s the difference between an internal security threat and an external threat?
In the case of an external security threat, an outside party is working to gain access to corporate digital assets, which could include intellectual property, client or patient data, bank accounts, or anything else deemed sensitive information. The outside threat actor will seek to exploit any vulnerability in systems, employees, or contractors for malicious purposes. However, external security threats can also include seeking entrance to physical spaces with ill intent, such as theft, damaging or accessing sensitive systems, and / or causing physical harm to employees.
In the case of an internal security threat, an employee or contractor who is employed by the target organization is an accomplice or sole threat actor – either willingly or accidentally. Because they already have some level of access to valuable corporate assets or spaces the damage is statistically far greater, because insiders already have some level of access.
An insider threat may not always be acting alone, and they may not always have malicious intent. In some cases, insiders collaborate with external threat actors to provide credentials, access, data, or proprietary assets. In other cases, insider threats may act alone, taking malicious action from within an organization, which could include fraud, theft, or corporate espionage (inappropriate data sharing). Quite often, insider threats are actually well-meaning employees who accidentally take some action that inadvertently either exposes sensitive corporate assets or creates external access that can be exploited by external threat actors.
What is insider threat detection, and why is it so important?
Insider threat detection is the process of identifying and mitigating risks posed by employees, contractors, or anyone else with access to corporate systems and sensitive assets. Insider threats can be detected using user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) tools that are designed specifically to alert on behavioral trends, changes, or anomalies that may constitute a threat. Identifying an insider threat requires the collection, aggregation, and analysis of granular behavioral data. Because insiders are in a position of trust, they can cause far more damage than external threat actors.
When it comes to accidental threats, the sooner you identify issues, the less chance you have of an external threat actor leveraging employees’ mistakes. These kinds of mistakes, if caught early, can be addressed with supplemental, targeted training, policies, and compliance enforcement to prevent them going forward. If, however, detection capabilities are not put in place, and errant behavior continues unmitigated, it can lead to serious data breaches, financial loss, and other consequences that most organizations would prefer to avoid.
How does insider threat detection work?
Successfully detecting and investigating insider threats requires several key factors: 1) granular user behavioral data, 2) established baselines, 3) context, and 4) solid investigation tools and techniques. Granular user behavioral data is collected through users’ daily inputs into their machines while working. This data could include the average time employees normally begin work, where they login, applications and websites used to accomplish tasks, the amount of time spent on particular tasks or working with certain datasets, and more.
This behavioral data is used to create a behavioral baseline for each employee, and can be aggregated to display averages and trends for whole teams. Those baselines are then used as a comparison by the UEBA tool, and when an employee behaves in ways they don’t normally, an alert is created. The level of sensitivity for this alerting system can be set by the tool administrator. Teams with greater access to highly sensitive information might have more sensitive settings, for example, because any change could be a serious concern.
The most important part of detecting an insider threat is to have enough data to establish context for individual events. For example, an alert showing that employee A accessed sensitive file X is not very useful in isolation. However, if you have enough information to quickly see that employee A was on a video call with the CEO, who asked them to open a file during their meeting, you have enough context to dismiss the alert. If, however, you don’t have enough behavior data to understand what’s happening, a non-infraction can look like a threat, or a threat can go completely unnoticed.
What are some common insider threat indicators?
Common indicators of an insider threat include:
- suddenly secretive or disgruntled behavior patterns
- signs of attempting to cover one’s tracks
- signs of information theft using approved channels or actions
- indications of noncompliant internet-based file sharing
- bypassing or attempting to bypass security controls
- and using one’s privileged access in unusual ways, like lingering on sensitive datasets longer than normal.
These and other problematic behaviors are not automatically detected by most IT systems and require UEBA tools to accurately identify, investigate, and take informed action.
How can I protect my organization from insider threats?
When addressing insider risk, it’s important to think about the factors that go into an effective insider risk management program. Steps to create an insider risk management program include:
- Establish goals for your insider risk program with key organizational stakeholders.
- What are your most important assets to protect (including human life)?
- How are you detecting early signs of emerging threats today?
- What tools do you have to alert on potentially malicious behaviors or actions?
- Who receives these alerts, and how are they handled?
- How long do investigations take today, and what tools are in place to help?
- Build a consensus around the importance of guarding against insider threats.
- Select a UEBA tool, or an enhancement to one you have in place, to detect insider risks.
- Communicate to employees the organization’s intent to monitor employee behaviors for security purposes, addressing any questions or concerns along the way.
- Deploy your UEBA monitoring tool and review analytics to establish baselines, which is the process of determining what “normal” looks like.
- Create technical rules within your tool that will flag abnormal, or anomalous, activities – meaning behaviors or single actions taken that fall outside of baseline norms.
- Decide who should review alerts and what types of alerts will be escalated, as well as who will be alerted in the event of an escalated incident.
- Test these settings with a practice run by having a designated employee take noncompliant actions to see if your team knows how to read reports and respond to alerts.
- If you haven’t already, create and publish corporate and technical policies around behaviors that could put the organization and its employees in harm’s way, and decide what actions will be taken even if various policies are broken. If you have achieved SOC2 status or are under industry or legal compliance requirements, your organization may already have such policies in place.
Can insider threat detection prevent all insider attacks?
As long as organizations possess information, assets, people, or ideas that bad actors can steal, there will be risk of an insider threat. When it comes to preventing attacks, putting the best tools, policies, processes, and collaborations in place allows an organization to mitigate risk to the greatest degree possible. Risk of attack, though, is not something an organization can ever eliminate. Threat actors will find ever more creative ways to steal. That’s why it’s essential to work with providers whose tools are under continuous development to help them not only detect insider threats, but anticipate them.
Is insider threat detection only about monitoring employee activity?
Insider threat detection is a broad concept that encompasses numerous aspects: cross-departmental collaboration, security monitoring, data loss prevention, and violence prevention. Since employees and contractors are, by definition, the main source of what would be considered an insider, monitoring employee and contractor activity – as well as activities conducted on their machines – remains a key tenet of insider threat detection.
How can employee monitoring help prevent insider threats?
Employee monitoring can help an organization establish baselines for what’s considered “normal” in the course of a work day. These baselines then allow employers to identify anomalous situations where an employee is acting outside of what is expected. This is essential to preventing insider threats in several ways. First, employers can gain visibility into an employee who may be increasingly disengaged or disgruntled, allowing them to provide early support before a potential threat begins to escalate. Second, employee monitoring tools alert on unusual and malicious activities like data exfiltration, fraud, theft, noncompliant access or use of data, and more. Without employee monitoring, it’s very difficult to gain the context needed to tell the difference between a malicious action and a simple mistake. Employee monitoring can provide immutable evidence that helps an organization protect itself and other employees in serious cases of insider threat attempts.
What are some of the challenges associated with insider threat detection?
Detecting insider threats requires detailed user behavior data, and only a handful of UEBA tools are capable of that kind of granularity. For example, one tool might alert on inappropriate access of a file, but if the moments leading up to and immediately following that file access are not captured, the alert lacks context. Additional logs will have to be pulled from other tools, which may or may not provide the answers needed by an investigator to understand the event. Additionally, it can be challenging to identify an insider who is deeply embedded in an organization and is not behaving erratically. In these cases, stealthier methodology may be used to exfiltrate data, such as renaming a sensitive file as something innocuous and printing it out. Most organizations don’t monitor printer activity and would not be able to detect this activity. Only through granular monitoring can stealthier insider threats be detected.
Can insider threat detection software automate the process of identifying risks?
Insider threat detection software can automate the process of identifying imminent threats. If the software has predictive analytics capabilities, however, it should also be able to automate the process of identifying emerging or escalating risk. Predictive analytics uses historical data, machine learning techniques, and statistical algorithms to determine likelihood of future outcomes. In the context of risk detection, predictive analytics can be applied to human behavior using risk scoring, identifying when an employee is at greater risk of becoming an insider threat.
Explore Teramind’s Insider Threat Prevention for 2 Key Industries Prone to Insider Threats.
Activity Monitoring for the
Healthcare Industry
Ensure consistent access to patient data and achieve compliance with user activity monitoring for healthcare.
Comprehensive Fraud and
Insider Threat Detection for Finance
Strengthen cybersecurity and insider threat detection for finance with a robust enterprise DLP endpoint monitoring solution.
Let's Get You Started
Protect your data, manage compliance and improve productivity with Teramind.
Solve for Security & Compliance with Teramind
Compliance Enforcement
Protect sensitive data and monitor the behaviors and activities of all users.
Insider Risk Management
Track and view the behaviors and activities behind your workforce.
What our Customers Say
Larissa H.
IT Support Specialist
Yakir D.
CIO
IT Security & Risk Manager
$7B Manufacturing Enterprise
