The CERT Guide to Insider Threats

05/12/2012 · No Responses

Since 2001, the CERT® Insider Threat Center at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has collected and analyzed information about more than seven hundred insider cyber crimes, ranging from national security espionage to theft of trade secrets. The CERT® Guide to Insider Threats describes CERT’s findings in practical terms, offering specific guidance and countermeasures that can be immediately applied by executives, managers, security officers, and operational staff within any private, government, or military organization.

The authors systematically address attacks by all types of malicious insiders, including current and former employees, contractors, business partners, outsourcers, and even cloud-computing vendors. They cover all major types of insider cyber crime: IT sabotage, intellectual property theft, and fraud. For each, they present a crime profile describing how the crime tends to evolve over time, as well as motivations, attack methods, organizational issues, and precursor warnings that could have helped the organization prevent the incident or detect it earlier. Beyond identifying crucial patterns of suspicious behavior, the authors present concrete defensive measures for protecting both systems and data.

This book also conveys the big picture of the insider threat problem over time: the complex interactions and unintended consequences of existing policies, practices, technology, insider mindsets, and organizational culture. Most important, it offers actionable recommendations for the entire organization, from executive management and board members to IT, data owners, HR, and legal departments.

With this book, you will find out how to

Identify hidden signs of insider IT sabotage, theft of sensitive information, and fraud
Recognize insider threats throughout the software development life cycle
Use advanced threat controls to resist attacks by both technical and nontechnical insiders
Increase the effectiveness of existing technical security tools by enhancing rules, configurations, and associated business processes
Prepare for unusual insider attacks, including attacks linked to organized crime or the Internet underground

By implementing this book’s security practices, you will be incorporating protection mechanisms designed to resist the vast majority of malicious insider attacks.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Overview
Chapter 2. Insider IT Sabotage
Chapter 3. Insider Theft of Intellectual Property
Chapter 4. Insider Fraud
Chapter 5. Insider Threat Issues in the Software Development Life Cycle
Chapter 6. Best Practices for the Prevention and Detection of Insider Threats
Chapter 7. Technical Insider Threat Controls
Chapter 8. Case Examples
Chapter 9. Conclusion and Miscellaneous Issues

Appendix A. Insider Threat Center Products and Services
Appendix B. Deeper Dive into the Data
Appendix C. CyberSecurity Watch Survey
Appendix D. Insider Threat Database Structure
Appendix E. Insider Threat Training Simulation: MERIT InterActive
Appendix F. System Dynamics Background