Insider threats in corporate environments

Abstract

Regardless of the established security controls that organizations have put in place to protect their digital assets, a rise in insider threats has been observed and particularly in incidents of data leakage. The importance of data as corporate assets is leading to a growing need for detection, prevention and mitigation of such violations by the organisations. In this paper we are investigating the different types of insider threats and their implications to the corporate environment, with specific emphasis to the special case of data leakage. Organisations should evaluate the risk they are facing due to insider threats and establish proactive measures towards this direction. In response to the challenging problem of identifying insider threats, we design a forensic readiness model, which is able to identify, prevent and log email messages, which attempt to leak information from an organisation with the aid of steganography.