Insider threat poses huge loss to organizations since malicious insiders have enough knowledge to attack high sensitive information. Moreover, preventing and detecting insider attacks is a hard job because malicious insiders follow legal paths to launch attacks. This threat leads all kinds of attacks in banking systems in the amount of loss it causes. Insider threat in banking systems poses huge harm to banks due to the importance and attractiveness of assets that banks have. This chapter discusses insider threat problem in banking sector, and introduces important surveys and case studies that show the severeness of this threat in this sector. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates some policies, technologies and tools that may prevent and detect insider threat in banking systems.
TopInsider Threat
Insider threat is a critical security problem. The threat of insiders can be posed unintentionally or intentionally by malicious insiders. Malicious insider threat is defined as the threat that is caused by a person who has authorized access privileges and knowledge of the computer systems of an organization, and is inspired to antagonistically influence the organization (Brackney & Anderson, 2004). Insiders could be employees, contractors, or business partners. They have the capabilities, which outsiders do not have, that enable them to launch complicated attacks.
According to different surveys (Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn & Richardson, 2005; CERT, 2011), insider threat is as risky as outsiders’ threat (hackers) due to the extreme harm that it may pose. The FBI Computer Crime Survey (Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn & Richardson, 2005) reported that trusted insiders were responsible of about 33% of all security breaches in 2005. Similarly, the Cyber Security Watch Survey (CERT, 2011) showed that 58% of attacks are caused by outsiders, whereas 21% of attacks are caused by insiders. Moreover, the survey shows that insider threat is as costly as outsider threat. However, Forrester Research (Forrester Research, 2010) showed that insider threat is the costliest type of incident. In addition, after analyzing the security practices of more than 300 European, American, and Australian enterprises, Forrester estimated that insiders were responsible for 75% of data security incidents in those enterprises in 2010. Similarly, Verizon Business breach report (Cooper, 2008; Subashini & Kavitha, 2010) stated that outsiders exposed about 30,000 records, whereas insiders exposed about 375,000 records indicating that the cost of insider threat is greatly more than the cost of outsider threat.