If a fraudster's target lies inside a protected system, they focus on attaining an employee's access privileges. Fraudsters prey on pawns and goofs for their cybercrimes. They use many tactics and techniques to get credentials: phishing emails, watering holes and weaponized malware, to name a few. With those credentials, fraudsters can move laterally within a system, escalate their privileges, make changes and access sensitive data or money. Fraudsters can access data or information from unsecured locations during outbound communication, using a command-and-control (C2) server. They can make outbound attempt changes or perform volume outbound transfers.

How fraudsters attack:

Seek vulnerability

• Deploy phishing email or malware
• Identify a rogue user
• Attain compromised credentials

Exploit access

• Move laterally to the desired target
• Escalate privilege as needed
• Access assets

Abuse access

• Obfuscate network activity
• Alter data
• Exfiltrate data

After establishing a threat model, organizations focus on detecting and remediating insider threats and security breaches.

Security teams must distinguish between a user's regular activity and potentially malicious activity to detect insider threats. To differentiate between activities, organizations must first close visibility gaps. They should then aggregate security data into a centralized monitoring solution, whether part of a security information and event management (SIEM) platform or standalone user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) solution. Many teams begin with access, authentication and account changelogs. Then, they broaden the scope to additional data sources, such as a virtual private network (VPN) and endpoint logs, as insider threat use cases mature.

Organizations must adopt a privileged-access-management (PAM) solution and feed data about access to privileged accounts from that solution into their SIEM. Once organizations centralize the information, they can model user behavior and assign risk scores. Risk scores are tied to specific risky events, such as user geography changes or downloading to removable media. Assigning risk scores also gives security operations center (SOC) teams the ability to monitor risk across the enterprise, whether creating watch lists or highlighting the top risky users in their organization.

With enough historical data, security models can create a baseline of normal behavior for each user. This baseline indicates the normal operating state of a user or machine so that the system can flag deviations. Deviations should be tracked for individual users and compared to other users in the same location, with the same job title or job function.

By adopting a user-focused view, security teams can quickly spot insider threat activity and manage user risk from a centralized location. For example, user behavioral analytics can detect abnormal login attempts at an unusual time of day or from an unusual location or multiple failed password attempts and generate an alert as appropriate for an analyst's validation. In other words, any behavioral anomalies will help identify when a user has become a malicious insider or if an external attacker has compromised their credentials.

Once validated, a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) system can create an insider threat remediation workflow. Then, the playbook can specify what remediation is needed. Potential remediation could include challenging the insider with MFA or revoking access, either of which can be done automatically in the identity access management (IAM) solution.

Security threats have increased and become more complex as work-from-home and remote-work practices have expanded. As a result, remote work has fundamentally shifted security priorities and changed security measures. This security shift has introduced new challenges for security teams:

• Increased overall security incidents due to behavior changes and increased attack surface
• Increased phishing attacks
• Lack of visibility of endpoints and servers not connected to VPN
• Changes in employee behaviors due to irregular work hours, different locations and web browsing behavior changes
• Increased SaaS application use and lack of visibility

Chief information security officers (CISOs) must cope with the rapid shift in IT security as it moves outside of the corporate network. A CISO's team must better understand their remote employees' distinct behaviors and remote-work implications to insider threat detection to effectively secure a company's assets. To address remote workforce challenges, CISOs must be able to answer the following questions:

• How can we verify the person logging into the corporate virtual private network (VPN) is the employee, not an attacker using stolen credentials?
• How can we verify an employee's anomalous behavior isn't a result of working remotely?
• How can we help secure employees connecting to open and unsecured internet locations, such as coffee shops?

By understanding remote workers' behaviors, security teams can detect abnormal behavior that could signal credential compromise or malicious intent. They can often detect these behaviors at the VPN boundary before employees cause potential damage. On the perimeter, CISOs should determine if their current insider threat capabilities enable them to:

• Get the appropriate visibility into access, authentication and VPN logs.
• Determine if employee credentials are being used in two places simultaneously or from an unusual geographic location.
• Identify if the employee uses credentials outside of regular working hours for the city of the primary employee location or if the connection duration is longer than usual.
• Terminate the connection, block the device and revoke credentials through IAM.

Suppose an attacker manages to evade detection at the perimeter and is inside the organization's network. In that case, security teams should validate the threat by looking for several compromised credentials or abuse indicators.

Security teams can derive insider threat indicators through many methods, often assisted by machine learning. These methods can help determine if the access is from a legitimate employee or a credential thief. Within the organization's network, CISOs should evaluate whether their current insider threat capabilities enable them to:

• Model distinct standard activity patterns and frequency to detect baseline deviation. A deviation can indicate abuse, whether intentional or accidental.
• Monitor data exfiltration attempts by the number of outbound communication attempts or connections on a given day. If an employee's number of outbound communications spikes, it could suggest monitoring that user's credentials closely.
• Identify large, abnormal data volume transfers for a given employee. Monitoring the aggregate data transfer can offer a simplistic yet powerful, early compromise indication.
• Inspect endpoint integrity for suspicious applications, which might indicate malware activity. By identifying new processes or application executions, you can contain the malware and reduce the organization's security risk.

By proactively adjusting their programs to compensate for the shift in employee behavior and maximize existing tool investments, security teams can better secure an enterprise network.