Hi, my name is Bob, I’m an IT Director at a mid-sized financial company and it’s been 11 months since my last insider attack…that I know of. (All together now) HI BOB!
I know this is a support group for IT Directors suffering from governance, risk and compliance issues, but candidly I don’t acknowledge that I, or my organization, has a problem. In my opinion, nothing can be totally secure so I just deal with issues as they come up. The most visible issue I’ve had to deal with in the past five years was attacks from hostile outsiders, so I’ve spent millions of dollars on perimeter security and can now say confidently that no one that isn’t approved can access any part of our IT infrastructure. Since the company hired all of those employees who do have access, I just assume that if the company trusts them enough to hire them, then IT can trust them not to steal or destroy sensitive data on the network servers or their personal desktops. I mean really, just because everyone of myhelp desk staff and every admin has a root credential on every server in my network doesn’t mean I have to worry about anything serious. Oh yea, and every developer needs su capabilities so they can recompile code, but what can that do?
Last week one of my employees told me he recently read an article that said the biggest IT security threat to organizations is from insiders and that the average cost of an insider attack was $7.2M but I don’t believe that can be right, and don’t feel like doing the research so am not going to evaluate my privilege identity or access control management.
But just in case, I made sure my boss didn’t see that article by blocking that URL from his personal computer.
