Having “complete” network security involves securing the system from threats within an organization as much as it does the threats outside of it. The people who are given access to the network are, logically, the ones most free to compromise the system if they have a mind to do it.

Who is Watching Over Internal Activities?

You don’t have to look far to see how devastating an insider attack can be on a network.

• An employee of Trend Micro sold the personal data of 68,000 customers back in 2019
• In 2020, a Twitter employee unwittingly shared his administrative access with a teenage hacker. This incident further shed light on the fact that Twitter had, at that time, over 1,500 employees with top-level access to the system.
• This September 2022 saw Uber experience a data breach that compromised several of their internal databases. Here again, all it took was a sly social engineer and one vulnerable employee with the right access for this breach to occur.

Two of these three examples regard situations where the employee meant no harm. They were targeted for their insider access, however, and they were compromised by a cyber criminal outsider who did mean harm. Employee network access is the soft white underbelly of any organization. It is much easier to create a hardened security surface to detect and thwart attackers outside of the system, and much trickier to put up protections to detect and prevent potentially hostile activity from those able to operate within it.