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Dealing with the insider threat

The threats to businesses from insiders covers areas such as malware deployment, but also fraud and sharing of company data with unauthorised third parties. When looking at insider incidents, research company Gartner says about 62% of these involve employees looking to establish a second stream of income from their employer’s data, while 29% steal information when they leave to help them in the future. Only 9% are saboteurs.

Protecting your business from threats like these, even simply preventing someone from taking a customer contact list, is not that easy in an environment where data is freely available. Employees often have customer lists, business plans and other sensitive data on mobile devices – laptops, tablets and smartphones – which is reasonable as it can assist them in making sales and servicing customers. But how does a business ensure this data does not end up supporting a competitor’s organisation?

Teramind has developed a range of solutions to combat the insider threat. The solutions are available either as a hosted or on-site system, where employees and data are automatically monitored. The cloud and on-site systems function identically. Moreover, the company is also pushing out a series of behavioural analytics that can identify suspicious behaviours and raise an alert, or even lock down the suspected user.

The employee-monitoring solutions are installed on users’ computers and monitor everything they do, from application usage through to email, even including web-based email offerings like Gmail. Management is able to draw reports and trends of behaviour, while ensuring that specific data is not sent out of the company.

Teramind’s behaviour monitoring application is able to create a baseline of acceptable behaviour for users, highlighting any anomalies and reacting in accordance with company policy – which could allow manual or automatic lockdown in extreme cases. This year will also see the company releasing departmental monitoring, which monitors standard behaviours in departments, again reacting to anomalies as prescribed in the client’s policy.

Administrators are also able to customise their monitoring applications, to exclude Gmail from the monitoring process, for example.

The company is running a pilot site in South Africa and is expanding its reach in the region. Currently, local companies offering the Teramind solution include Telecommunications Solutions (crispin@telecommunicationsolutions.co.za) and infoGuardian (dylan@infoguardian.com)

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