One of the most difficult security threats to handle is insider threats. Such threats are usually malicious and may lead to serious security problems.
Sometimes, they occur due to user or employee negligence, and they may also be unintentional. These threats are posed by authorized users, as opposed to external attacks. This undermines the conventional defense systems.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) helps protect data directly. DSPM improves how organizations prevent data misuse and exposure. It does this through visibility, monitoring, and automation. Here are the seven key roles DSPM plays in mitigating insider security threats.
Complete Visibility in Sensitive Data Assets
Before any protection can begin, you must know what you are protecting. Many insider threats exploit unknown or unmanaged data stores. The first role of DSPM is to build visibility and create a full inventory of your data landscape.
Mapping the Data Universe
DSPM solutions automatically scan and catalog data in multi-cloud environments. This includes AWS S3 buckets, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud SQL databases. The process finds shadow data.
Shadow data often comes from stores that employees create for projects or testing. They might forget about them or set them up without permission. These stores frequently hold sensitive information that is left unprotected.
Classifying Data by Sensitivity
Discovery alone isn’t enough. DSPM classifies data by its content and context. It finds information with personally identifiable details. It also flags financial data, such as payment card information.
Additionally, it tags valuable assets, such as intellectual property. This classification highlights your crown jewels – your most valuable data. These are malicious insider targets and can be very damaging when revealed. It gives you an idea of what parts of security you need to concentrate on most.
Enforcing Strict Data Access Controls
Excessive permissions are a primary enabler of insider threats. When users can access data they don’t need for their jobs, the risk of misuse or abuse increases. The governor role of DSPM is all about enforcing the principle of least privilege in the data estate.
Identifying Permission Sprawl
Modern security systems offer a transparent, centralized view of who’s permitted to access what data. It flags overprivileged user accounts and service accounts with unnecessary data access. It also spots stale accounts that should have been removed. This visibility is the first step in reducing the internal attack surface.
Enforcing Least Privilege
With this intelligence, security teams can make informed decisions to right-size permissions. DSPM does more than find problems; it gives context for fixing them. This might mean taking away direct data store access. Instead, it could provide controlled query interfaces. It may also involve removing unnecessary permissions for a user’s role.
Uncovering Anomalous User Behavior
Some of the worst insider threats are slow and stealthy. Authorized users may seem to act normally, but their actions can be harmful. This is where DSPM moves from a static security model to a dynamic, behavioral one.
Establishing a Behavioral Baseline
DSPM works with user and entity behavior analytics to understand normal data access for users. This integration helps identify any unusual behavior. It recognizes usual access times and the amounts of data involved. It also identifies the specific data sets that an employee often requires. Any significant deviation from this baseline is flagged for review.
Flagging High-Risk Activities
At its core, DSPM detecting insider threats works by spotting subtle, suspicious patterns. Security teams might otherwise overlook these patterns.
For instance, a user might download gigabytes of customer data they’ve never accessed. They might access sensitive intellectual property outside regular hours. Sometimes, they even connect from an unusual location. Such detection is vital for identifying malicious users and compromised accounts.
Constant Compliance and Control Monitoring
Negligent insiders risk data exposure through misconfigured storage. This often leads to accidental exposure. Regular and active auditing is crucial. It helps users catch and correct errors before others can take advantage of them.
Monitoring for Misconfigurations
DSPM continuously audits data storage configurations against security best practices and compliance standards. It alerts teams if cloud storage is public or if encryption is off for a sensitive database. It also flags issues like logging being turned off on a critical server. This prevents simple mistakes from becoming major data breaches.
Providing an Audit Trail
Organizations must show who accessed data and when to comply with data regulations. DSPM automates this logging and reporting, providing a clear and immutable audit trail. This is key to showing auditors that your business is compliant. It is also important for your internal security reviews.
Prioritizing Risks with Context
Alerts tend to overwhelm security teams. The absence of the proper context makes such alerts confusing. Some signal real crises, while others are just minor anomalies. DSPM acts as a triage specialist to cut through the noise.
Correlating Data Points
A DSPM system does not operate in silos. It correlates data sensitivity, user privileges, and the severity of a behavioral anomaly. A low-privilege user accessing a public marketing document is a non-issue. A system administrator with wide access to downloading classified source code is very important.
Enabling Focused Response
Effective DSPMs assess risks and prioritize them. By doing this, security analysts will be in a position to focus on the most important alerts. Such a targeted method prevents alert fatigue. It accelerates reaction to real threats, ensuring that we address the greater threats first.
Conducting Forensic Analysis
When a potential insider threat is identified, speed is critical. The faster an investigation can be completed, the less damage occurs. DSPM provides the forensic capabilities to understand an incident’s full scope quickly.
Answering Critical Questions
If a user is flagged for suspicious activity, security teams can immediately use the DSPM platform to investigate. It provides immediate answers to fundamental questions:
a) What exact files were accessed?
b) When did the access occur?
c) What actions were performed, such as reading, copying, or deleting?
d) Where was the access initiated from?
Reducing Investigation Time
Mean time to respond is dropped to a minimum with this centralized visibility. Logs across systems are now accessible to analysts in a single location. This single view makes access to data easier for performing forensic analysis. It assists analysts in being able to have a quick look at whether an incident is a false positive or a real threat.
Automating Remediation and Data Loss Prevention
The last and most proactive DSPM role is to transcend detection to automated prevention. It is also connected to other security tools to amplify security. Such integration enables it to prevent attempts at exfiltration of data and other malicious practices.
Triggering Automated Responses
Automated playbooks may execute on modern DSPM platforms. These react to certain high-confidence threats. To illustrate, when a user attempts to take as much sensitive data as possible, the system can easily revoke access. It can also sanction the data they are utilizing or a high-priority ticket in a security service.
Strengthening the Data Loss Prevention Strategy
This role builds on wider Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Traditional DLP prevents data at the network edge. Conversely, DSPM provides important data context to enhance enforcement. It enlightens the DLP system on sensitive data, its location, and accessibility. This aids in making DLP policies more specific and effective.
Conclusion
Threats posed by insiders are difficult to control since they’re orchestrated by trusted users. DSPM addresses this concern through direct data protection. It offers transparency, behavior analysis, and automated controls. This assists organizations in identifying risks at an early stage, implementing least privilege, and responding swiftly.
In addition to curbing data misuse, DSPM promotes accountability and resilience. In the current changing threat environment, the implementation of DSPM is not just a security approach. It is a business survival requirement in the long run.
