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Tackling the insider threat

Secnovate and its strategic partner, Condyn, has run a series of executive briefings on insider threats, which represents a growing and important threat vector for all organisations, big and small.

These executive briefings were held in Johannesburg and Cape Town during mid-April 2019, and hosted by Jorina van Rensburg, CEO of Condyn, Dr Graham Wright, CEO of Secnovate and Sergey Ozhegov, CEO of SearchInform.

Condyn, the Africa office for SearchInform, provides access to the SearchInform Risk Monitor software and services which are designed to assist companies in fulfilling their risk management obligations, facilitate regulatory compliance and investigation processes, prevent corporate fraud, and detect employee abnormal behaviour.

The solution has the capacity to assist organisations in identifying and preventing harmful insider activities, both intentional and negligent, and against loss and leakage of sensitive information, all of which could lead to serious financial losses and damage to reputation.

The multi-dimensional nature of the insider threat solution will impact and assist risk managers, internal auditors and C-level executives as well as information security analysts and compliance officers in fulfilling their respective responsibilities.

Insider threats are possibly the biggest challenge facing today’s corporate risk officer and are often very difficult to detect. These challenges are often exacerbated in times of economic distress and an unstable political and business environment – when employees and insiders are increasingly the target of disruptive syndicates and open to the highest bidder. Employee disaffection and other pressures on these people, which often occupy levels of high trust, are raising the private and public sector risk levels in ways previously not seen.

Statistics from the USA highlighted by Jim Green, CTO of Secnovate, in his presentation at the event illustrated that fraud is the top insider issue companies face (37% of companies were impacted by insider fraud). IT sabotage was the second highest at 21% with espionage coming in at 19%. All of these activities are enabled by insiders, although some have outside influencers.

The SearchInform Risk Monitor is used by more than 2000 clients across 17 countries, with the software installed on over 1.2 million PCs. The solution manages all internal threats to an organisation by controlling the movement of data, data at rest, and employee behaviour. This is an omni-channel protection solution with a secure information perimeter without loopholes.

The solution controls email correspondence, voice and text messages, sent files (Skype, Viber, ICQ, etc.), data loaded/downloaded to/from cloud services, Messages on forums and comments in blogs, external devices (USB, hard drives, CD/DVD disks), and documents sent to print.

The solution is based on two platforms: network and agent. In the case with network platform, the components control traffic at the corporate network level. In the case with agent platform, the components capture the users’ activity at the endpoints and transmit data to the server via the Internet or internal network.

The broad capabilities and attributes of the SearchInform Risk Monitor makes this one of the most comprehensive tools capable of identifying insider threats while these are happening, as well as undertaking forensically sound investigations into incidents. The solution has been used successfully to prevent and investigate many fraudulent and criminal activities some examples of which are provided in the following links: www.securitysa.com/61825n and www.securitysa.com/9179a.

For more information, contact:

• Condyn, info@condyn.net, www.condyn.net

• Secnovate, info@secnovate.com, www.secnovate.com

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