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Ofcom suffers biggest ’insider threat’ breach in its history - expert comment
March 2016 by David Gibson, VP of strategy and market development at Varonis
The Guardian has reported that Ofcom, the media regulator, has suffered the biggest breach in its history involving the misuse of data that was downloaded by an employee before leaving the company. The former employee offered a large amount of sensitive information to his new employee, a major broadcaster.
David Gibson, VP of strategy and market development at Varonis, said:
“A vast number of data breaches are due to insiders, malicious or otherwise. The root of the problem is that most employees have access to far more information than they need to do their jobs, their data activities are not monitored or analysed for malicious behaviour. This is especially true for unstructured data – the largest, fastest growing kind of data that often contains an organisation’s intellectual property, financial records, and other important content. As a result, low-level workers can access and make off with highly sensitive information, often without anyone knowing. To make matters worse, outsider attackers often hijack employee or contractor credentials and then have the same free access as insiders. Organisations have to start doing a better job of tracking and analysing how users use data, profiling their roles and behaviours, mapping and reducing unwanted access, discovering sensitive data and locking it down or moving it out of harm’s way."
