Insider Threat Combatting the Enemy Within 1st Edition by Clive Blackwell ISBN 184928010X 978-1849280105

Is your vital business information vulnerable to an attack from within? Growing dependence on IT may mean your business is becoming increasingly vulnerable to a sinister and unpleasant threat: the threat from within. How exposed is your company to the risk of a malicious attack by a discontented or psychologically unbalanced employee? What precautions have you taken to ensure that your IT systems cannot be manipulated for purposes of insider fraud? What steps do you need to take to prevent your IT systems from falling prey to organized crime through someone who has been planted within your firm or someone who is being threatened or bribed? Product designs and customer lists are not only useful information to you. They are also valuable information for your competitors. Employees who move to another company, or decide to set up in business on their own, may attempt to take some of this information with them. How will you stop this from happening? In this book, Clive Blackwell gets you up to speed on the key security problems that businesses are now facing as a result of the insider threat. Benefits to business include: •Protect your company from sabotage. With the right strategy in place, you can restrict the opportunities open to disgruntled employees to disrupt your business operations through your IT system. •Prevent major fraud. By employing dual control mechanisms for authorising large transactions, and by investigating accounting anomalies, you can protect your business from insider fraud. •Prevent information theft. Use least privilege rules to limit data access, and set up a proper system of data management. You need to ensure that your employees cannot sell or exploit your proprietary information for their own purposes if you want to protect your competitiveness. As Dr Blackwell comments, “”Systematic defence is required, as no single method can protect against employees with legitimate access to organizational resources.””