16 Nov Cybercrime Is An Inside Job

Code42’s book teaches CISOs to go new-school on data security

– Steve Morgan, Editor-in-Chief

Sausalito, Calif. – Nov 16, 2020

Okay, CISOs, we’ve had a problem here.

66 percent of data breaches involve an insider, but only 10 percent of security budgets are focused on internal threats, says Joe Payne, president and CEO at Code42.

To be blunt — employees are stealing your organization’s data, and you’re not doing enough to stop it.

Sometimes it takes a few statistics to open our eyes to a problem. Payne co-authored a book — Inside Jobs: Why Insider Risk Is The Biggest Cyber Threat You Can’t Ignore — which provides ample proof of the enormity of what his firm aims to fix.

The storyline is the numbers, which come out of the book and a Data Exposure Report from Code42. This is exactly what a CISO needs to make a boardroom business case for a bigger cybersecurity budget.

Cybercrime TV: Joe Payne, CEO at Code42

Co-author of Inside Jobs says stealing data has never been easier

INSIDER THREAT STATISTICS

Code42 commissioned research which surveyed 1,028 information security leaders, as well as 615 business decision-makers, all with decision-making powers, or influence over, the provisioning of security solutions, products and services.

The results are in:

• There is a 47 percent jump in insider threats from 2018 to 2020.
• 66 percent of organizations breached by an insider threat had a data loss prevention (DLP) solution in place.
• The average cost of an insider threat incident is $11 million (USD).
• Of the 38 percent of companies that admitted to experiencing a data breach in the previous 18 months, half cited employee actions as the cause.
• More than 25 percent of information security leaders do not monitor the data that new employees bring into their organizations.
• Nearly 60 percent of information security leaders and around 50 percent of business decision-makers say that their colleagues have infiltrated data, which puts their current organization at risk of lawsuits and reputational damage.
• Almost 40 percent of information security leaders admit that their company suffered a breach of intellectual property in the last 18 months.

BIG BROTHER GONE WRONG

Watching over employees and tracking their actions is old-school data security and it doesn’t work as you can see from the survey results.

Acting as an ally versus an adversary is new-school and where progressive boardroom and C-suite executives, CIOs and CISOs are going. This is Code42’s philosophy and it’s embodied in their INCYDR risk detection and response platform.

To combat the insider threat, there are two must-haves: Don’t overwhelm your security team because they already are, and don’t inhibit employee productivity.

THE PITCH

Code42’s proposition to CISOs is hard to resist. Buy the book and decide if the insider risk is serious enough for you to do something more about it. Cybercrime Magazine spent $24.99 for a hardcover copy (there’s a Kindle version for $16.99) and our editors learned a surprising amount of new information on a critical topic we’re often asked about.

A cybersecurity book is only as good as its authors. Payne’s co-authors Jadee Hansen and Mark Wojtasiak have vast experience with insider threats, and they’re exceptional writers. The trio pulled off a great read — not an easy feat in our space.

George Kurtz, founder and CEO at CrowdStrike, who penned the foreword, says the book comes at an important inflection point for businesses and for the CISOs who keep organizations safe from internal and external threats.

Anyone looking for an inexpensive and thoughtful holiday gift or stocking stuffer for your CISO — you just found it! 

– Steve Morgan is founder and Editor-in-Chief at Cybersecurity Ventures.

Go here to read all of my blogs and articles covering cybersecurity. Go here to send me story tips, feedback and suggestions.

Sponsored by Code42

Code42 is on a mission to speed the time to detect and respond to data risk from insider threats.

We are not new to the cyber security scene — but our approach to insider risk protection is. For nearly 20 years, we’ve been safeguarding the data of more than 50,000 organizations, including 18 of the world’s most valuable brands. And as their needs — and the needs of their workforces — have evolved, so have our data security solutions.

Today, our team of 500 employees is 100 percent focused on delivering solutions built with the modern-day collaborative culture in mind. Tracking activity across computers, email and the cloud, our SaaS-based insider risk solution surfaces and prioritizes file exposure and exfiltration events that represent real business threats and need investigation. The game-changer is that it works without locking down access to data. The end result? For security practitioners, it means speed to detection and response. For companies, it means a workforce that is productive and a business that is secure.