Insider Threat: Protecting the Enterprise from Sabotage, Spying, and Theft

by Eric Cole and Sandra Ring

Book Overview

The Secret Service, FBI, NSA, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and George Washington University have all identified "Insider Threats" as one of the most significant challenges facing IT,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1597490482
• ISBN13: 9781597490481
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Syngress Publishing
• Length: 424 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

5 stars if you're doing a research paper & need a book for a reference

This book is an easy read and served me well in my research paper on the cyber threat of the authorized insider. Eric Cole is a credentialed and excellent source on this topic. While I had textbooks that also discussed this, they did not go into the detail that this book did. A great source for those pursuing degrees in Information Assurance.

Insider Threat-The Right Focus

Frankly, this book does a great job addressesing major problem. Companies must be aware of and manage risk to economic, sensitive and classified information espionage. I have to say that Sandra Ring and Dr. Cole have it right on. Security Manager focus should be on the insider threat. I have had the opportunity to hear one of the authors speak at a recent security event. The speaker correctly addressed that the largest security threat to any company is from the insider-the one with all the access. A cyber or network catastrophe is one disgruntled employee away. The speaker gave example after example of former employees who felt both an ownership of the product and a significant employer betrayer. This and their access to sensitive information have allowed and opportunity to steal customer information, sabotage networks or software, or sell data to competing companies. They recommend rightly that Security managers should focus efforts on protecting proprietary and identity revealing information. This protection should include protecting trade secrets, establishing good termination procedures, learning to recognized disgruntled employees, use password protection and realizing that with networks and internet, an outside threat could easily become an inside threat. I look forward to learning more from this book and applying it to my business.

AN INSIDE JOB!!

Do you know how to prevent employees and contractors from stealing your corporate data? If you don't, then this book is for you. Authors Eric Cole and Sandra Ring, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that shows you how to protect your enterprise from sabotage, spying and theft. Cole and Sandra Ring, begin with an introduction on how bad the insider threat problem really is and why you should be concerned about it. Then, the authors cover a wide range of technologies and methods that can be used by an insider to cause harm to a company. Next, they discuss unique insider threats to state and local government institutions. The authors continue by drawing your attention to the fact that insiders within the federal government do not just commit espionage. They also discuss various threats to information, such as sabotage and theft, the impact of these actions to the reputation and financial health of organizations, and describe several real-life case studies involving well-known commercial companies. Next, the authors highlight the threat of identity theft and what institutions can do to help prevent insiders from participating in fraud rings. The authors also focus on insider threats from government contractors. Then, they do a profile of insider threats. The authors continue by showing you how to respond to problem of insider threat by looking at technologies and concepts that can be used to control and limit the damage that insiders can perform. Finally, they examine how a company goes about surviving an insider threat and increasing their defenses over time to minimize the amount of damage it will cause. This most excellent book will show you why internal threats are exponentially more dangerous that external threats. More importantly, this book will show you how to protect your most important intellectual property assets.

A guide which focuses on corporate data theft and its prevention

Dr. Eric Cole and Sandra Ring's Insider Threat: Protecting The Enterprise From Sabotage, Spying, And Theft explains how insider attacks often occur within organizations themselves, showing risk facts, methods, and how to recognize the first signs of an insider conspiracy routine. Learn how technology can thwart such attacks, define an acceptable level of loss in the process, and learn how to screen new hires and protect intellectual property assets with a guide which focuses on corporate data theft and its prevention.

Excellent overview of the insider threat to networks and information systems

Thousands of computer security books have been published that deal with every conceivable security issue and technology. But Insider Threat is one of the first to deal with one of the most significant threats to an organizations, namely that of the trusted insider. The problem is that within information technology, many users have far too much access and trust than they should truly have. The retail and gambling sectors have long understood the danger of the insider threat and have built their security frameworks to protect against both the insider and the outsider. Shoplifters are a huge bane to the retail industry, exceeded only by thefts from internal employees behind the registers. The cameras and guards in casinos are looking at both those in front of and behind the gambling tables. Casinos understand quite well that when an employee is spending 40 hours a week at their location dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars; over time, they will learn where the vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. For a minority of these insiders, they will commit fraud, which is invariably much worse than any activity an outsider could alone carry out. Insider Threat is mainly a book of real-life events that detail how the insider threat is a problem that affects every organization in every industry. In story after story, the book details how trusted employees will find weaknesses in systems in order to carry out financial or political attacks against their employers. It is the responsibility to the organization to ensure that their infrastructure is designed to detect these insiders and their systems resilient enough to defend against them. This is clearly not a trivial task. The authors note that the crux of the problem is that many organizations tend to think that once they hire an employee or contractor, that the person is now part of a trusted group of dedicated and loyal employees. Given that many organizations don't perform background checks on their prospective employees, they are placing a significant level of trust in people they barely know. While the vast majority of employees can be trusted and are honest, the danger of the insider threat is that it is the proverbial bad apple that can take down the entire tree. The book details numerous stories of how a single bad employee has caused a company to go out of business. Part of the problem with the insider threat is that since companies are oblivious to it, they do not have a framework in place to determine when it is happening, and to deal with it when it occurs. With that, when the insider attack does occur, which it invariably will, companies have to scramble to recover. Many times, they are simply unable to recover, as the book details in the cases of Omega Engineering and Barings Bank. The premise of Insider Threat is that companies that don't have a proactive plan to deal with insider threats will ultimately be a victim of insider threats. The 10 chapters in the book expand on this and p