insider threat | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Are You an Employee? It's quite possible that someone has been reading your messages, emails, listening to your phone calls, and monitoring your activities at work. No, it's not a spy agency or any hacker… ...Oops! It's your Boss. Recently, European Court had ruled that the Employers can legally monitor as well as read workers' private messages sent via chat software like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and webmail accounts like Gmail or Yahoo during working hours. So, if you own a company or are an Employer, then you no need to worry about tracking your employees because you have right to take care of things that could highly affect your company and its reputation, and that is Your Employees! Since there are several reasons such as Financial Need, Revenge, Divided Loyalty or Ego, why a loyal employee might turn into an INSIDER THREAT . Insider Threat is a nightmare for Millions of Employers. Your employees could collect and leak all your professional, ...

An unsatisfied Employee may turn into a Nightmare for you and your organization. Nowadays, installing an antivirus or any other anti-malware programs would be inadequate to beef up the security to maintain the Corporate Database. What would you do if your employee itself backstabbed you by breaching the Hypersensitive Corporate Secrets? Yes! There could be a possibility for an Internal Breach all the time. Just last year, an ex-employee stole Yandex Search Engine Source Code and tried to sell it for just $29,000 in the underground market. Over a few years, hackers have adopted various techniques ranging from Stress Attacks to Social Engineering tactics in order to gain the Classified Corporate information. Hackers Offering $23,000 for Internal Access Now hackers are rolling their dice for the next Deceptive Step to acquire Corporate Login Details of Irish Apple Employees in exchange of 20,000 Euro ( $23,000 USD ). The current situation is being faced...

You can tell the story of the current state of stolen credential-based attacks in three numbers: Stolen credentials were the #1 attacker action in 2023/24, and the breach vector for 80% of web app attacks . (Source: Verizon). Cybersecurity budgets grew again in 2024, with organizations now spending almost $1,100 per user (Source: Forrester).  Stolen credentials on criminal forums cost as little as $10 (Source: Verizon). Something doesn't add up. So, what's going on? In this article, we'll cover: What's contributing to the huge rise in account compromises linked to stolen creds and why existing approaches aren't working.  The world of murky intelligence on stolen credentials, and how to cut through the noise to find the true positives. Recommendations for security teams to stop attackers from using stolen creds to achieve account takeover. Stolen credential-based attacks are on the rise There's clear evidence that identity attacks are now the #1 cyber threat f...

A former employee of Russian search engine Yandex allegedly stole the source code and key algorithms for its search engine site and then attempted to sell them on the black market to fund his own startup. Russian publication Kommersant reports that Dmitry Korobov downloaded a type of software nicknamed " Arcadia " from Yandex's servers, which contained highly critical information, including the source code and some of the "key algorithms," of its search engine. Korobov then tried to sell the stolen codes to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked, and on the dark underground market in search of potential buyers. But What's the Punchline? The funniest part is that Korobov requested only $25,000 and 250,000 rubles (a total of almost $29,000) for Yandex's source code and algorithms, which actually cost "Billions of Rubles," or somewhere near $15 Million USD . However, Korobov was arrest...

National Security Agency (NSA) – the one that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into large fiber networks, and can target anyone, at any time, at any place; but lapsed somewhere in protecting its own privacy and security of the confidential data. If I am wrong, then from where did Snowden gets hold over roughly 1.7 million NSA's confidential files in sequence? According to the Intelligence officials who has investigated the insider theft by Snowden, noticed that he had accessed all these documents using some ' web crawler ', a freely available automated tool also known as spiders, which used to search, index and backup a website, " scraped data out of our systems " he said. " We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence ," he added. He used the web crawler tool against NSA 's internal network and 'probably...

Since all threats to data security and privacy often come from outside, but internal threats are comparatively more dangerous and a difficult new dimension to the data loss prevention challenge i.e. Data Breach . The " Insider threats " have the potential to cause greater financial losses than attacks that originate outside the company. This is what happened recently with three credit card firms in South Korea , where the financial and personal data belonging to users of at least 20 million, in a country of 50 million, was stolen by an employee, who worked as a temporary consultant at Korean Credit Bureau (KCB). " Confidential data of customers ranging from the minister-level officials to celebrities, including their phone numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, and even some banking records, have been leaked from Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank and several other commercial banks ", The stolen data includes the bank account numbers, customers' names, social security number...

It is always important to secure our system against outside threats i.e. Hackers, but it also required to protect against insider threats. The potential of damage from an Insider threat can be estimated from the example of Edward Snowden who had worked at the NSA , and had authorized access to thousands of NSA's Secret Documents, networks and systems. ' According to a recent Verizon report, insider threats account for around 14% of data breaches in 2013." Mostly, securing data involves just encryption in the cloud and keeping encryption keys out of the hands of rogue employees, but it is not enough where rogue employees should have access to encryption keys as part of their work. To prevent such risk of rogue employees misusing sensitive data, CloudFlare has released an open source encryption software " Red October ," with " two-man rule " style file encryption and decryption. " Two-man rule ", a control mechanism designed to achieve a hi...

WikiLeaks' release of secret government communications should serve as a warning to the nation's biggest companies: You're next. Computer experts have warned for years about the threat posed by disgruntled insiders and poorly crafted security policies that give too much access to confidential data. WikiLeaks' release of U.S. diplomatic documents shows that the group can—and likely will—use the same methods to reveal the secrets of powerful corporations. As WikiLeaks claims it has incriminating documents from a major U.S. bank, possibly Bank of America, there's new urgency to address information security inside corporations. This situation also highlights the limitations of security measures when confronted with a determined insider. At risk are companies' innermost secrets—emails, documents, databases, and internal websites thought to be locked from the outside world. Companies create records of every decision they make, whether it's rolling out new produ...

The crystal ball gazing has started early this year. Typically, tech prediction pieces emerge after Christmas, but the first 'security trends for 2011' missive has already dropped into my inbox. So, what does the somewhat premature Imperva Application Defense Center think will worry us the most on the IT security front next year? I predict the list will include more Stuxnet-like attacks, insights on the cloud's benefits or drawbacks, and concerns about mobile device security. Let's see if my crystal ball accurately predicts the predictions. Imperva ADC says the top 10 IT security trends for 2011 will be, with my comments in parentheses: Nation-Sponsored Hacking : (Yay, strike one - Stuxnet worm clones prediction right at the top.) These attacks will build on concepts and techniques from the commercial hacker industry to create more powerful Advanced Persistent Threats. (I predict someone will get a Buzzword Bingo full house with that one.) Insider Threat Awarenes...