Insider Threat: A Guide to Understanding, Detecting, and Defending Against the Enemy from Within

Insider Threat - A Guide to Understanding, Detecting, and Defending Against the Enemy from Within looks beyond perimeter protection tools, and shows how a security culture based on international best practice can help mitigate the insider threat to your security.

It also provides some short-term quick fixes that can be applied as your organizations builds an effective insider threat programme.

Read this book to learn:

• The seven organizational characteristics common to insider threat victims.
• The ten stages of a malicious attack.
• The ten steps of a successful insider threat programme.
• How to construct a three-tier security culture, encompassing artefacts, values and shared assumptions.

Insider Threat details the measures that organizations can implement to ensure high-impact quick wins, mapping appropriate security controls from the ISO 27001, ISO 27002, and NIST SP 800-53 standards to the following points, and more:

• Risk mitigation and the eight steps of a risk assessment
• The importance of training and awareness, and conducting staff background screening
• Monitoring and auditing the activities of general and privileged users, and quickly responding to suspicious behaviors
• Metrics to measure insider threat behavior and mitigation
• The challenge of external or temporary insiders (such as consultants, support contractors, partners, service providers, temporary employees)
• Layering physical and digital defenses to provide defense in depth
• The importance of conducting regular penetration testing to evaluate security controls
• Limiting, monitoring and controlling remote access and mobile device use
• Ensuring supply-chain security
• Maintaining an incident management capability

It also sets out what not to do, listing a set of worst practices that should be avoided.

About the Author

Dr Julie Mehan is the founder and president of JEMStone Strategies and a principal cyber security analyst in a strategic consulting firm in Virginia. She has delivered cyber security and related privacy services to senior commercial, Department of Defense and federal government clients working in Italy, Australia, Canada, Belgium and the United States. Dr Mehan is also an associate professor at the University of Maryland University College, specialising in courses in cyber security, cyber terror, IT in organisations, and ethics in an Internet society.