What is Insider Attack?

Cyber attacks are attacks on Cyber networks involving the internet carried out by professional cyber-hacking experts. The main motivation, which drives the growing cyber crimes, is the ever-growing internet dependency. Over the years, the use of computer networks making use of the internet has increased enormously. Cyber criminals have taken advantage of this increasing demand for internet-related services to exploit the privacy of users and organisations that use computer networks to store their private information for ease among many other advantages of using the internet.

Here, in this article, we will discuss a very risky form of cyber attack – Insider Attacks in detail.

Although there exists a lot of Symmetric and Asymmetric key based techniques exists for secure communication but if a person who have privilege to access to stored credentials of users. In that scenario also our system should be robust for that kind of things. Security breaches higher the risk of vulnerabilities being exploited by attackers. Cyber criminals aim at breaching the security loopholes to enter into the computer system and execute their malicious intent of stealing private user information. The access of confidential information to unauthorised individuals is a serious form of crime and not accepted by law under any circumstances. Cyber crimes are thus regarded as very dangerous in nature and must be taken care of from happening in any aspect. Cyber attacks can be prevented by proper knowledge of cyber attacks and facts about different cyber security techniques.

Insider Attack:

• Insider Attack gets their name as these are the attacks that people having inside access to information cause. 
• The inside people may be current or former employees, business partners, contractors, or security admins who had access to the confidential information previously.  
• Insider Attacks are carried out by people who are familiar with the computer network system and hold authorised access to all the information. 
• This form of cyber attack is extremely dangerous as the attack is led by the system employees, which makes the entire process extremely vulnerable. 
• Computer organisations , most likely focus on external cyber attack protection and rarely have their attention focused on internal cyber-attacks. 

Insider Types:

• Malicious Insider: Someone who maliciously and intentionally misuses legitimate credentials, usually stealing information for financial or personal incentives. For example, someone who has a score against a former employer or an opportunistic employee who sells sensitive information to competitors.
• Careless Insider: An instrument that unknowingly exposes your system to external threats. This is the most common type of internal threat caused by a bug. If the device remains unprotected or becomes a victim of fraud. For example, a harmless employee could click on an insecure link to infect a system with malware. 
• Mole: A scammer who is technically an outsider but has gained insider access to a privileged network. This is an outsider of the organisation to hide as an employee or partner.

Threat Indicators:

• Activity at unusual times: signing in to the network after working hours.
• The volume of traffic: transferring too much data via the network of the company.
• The type of activity:  accessing unusual resources.

Risk Analysis:

• Insider can be an adversory at any time and perform security attacks which are descibed in the threat models.
• An Adversary (attacker) can find out one key(long term) value in polynomial amount of time, in this scenario it becomes more hazardous to the system.
• There are a lot of protocols exists in which the password fields of the users are not stored in the Encrypted format in that case insider can find out the password patterns of the user and sell to attackers which can lead them to the password guessing attack with high probability.

Prevention Techniques:

Below, listed are the ways to prevent Insider Attacks:

• Active Directory
• Endpoint protection system
• Intrusion prevention system
• Intrusion detection system
• Web filtering solution
• Traffic monitoring software
• Spam filter
• Privileged access management system
• Encryption software
• Password management policy and system with at least two-factor authentication
• Call manager
• Data loss prevention system