Plenty of technologies are available for limiting contractor access to data, DLP Experts' Thorkelson says. "Identity access management and those kinds of technologies ... why not use these technologies that keep data from being shared with other people?" he says.
More thorough vetting of contractors and employees is another best practice organizations should adopt during the hiring process, Neohapsis' Hubbard says. "A lot of organizations feel there's a one-size-fits-all in the background check process," he says. But that's not the case, so organizations should stay on top of what background checks providers use to investigate employees and contractors who will be handling sensitive data, he says.
According to Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Insider Threat Center, prevention of an insider attack or leak is key. "At the least, you need to organize a well-thought-out insider threat program that can help protect you and deter other incidents like workplace violence," says Mike Theis, chief counterintelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Insider Threat Center, in a recent interview with Dark Reading. Theis declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the ongoing investigation of the NSA and Snowden leak case.
For mitigating insider threats, CERT publishes the Common Sense Guide To Insider Threat, which provides best practices, such as documenting and consistently enforcing policies and controls, adopting least privilege and enforcing separation of duties, and incorporating insider threat awareness into security training programs.
"If someone might be turning bad, there still is an opportunity to stop" and prevent them from acting, Theis says.
Remotely located users or contractors are not always well-monitored. Snowden, for example, worked for Booz Allen on the NSA contract as part of a small unit in Hawaii. "Management has the responsibility for oversight of its workforce members, but, unfortunately, they don't [often] take an active role," Hubbard says.
In the case of contractors working for the intelligence community, it's difficult to spot a leak, however. "They're going to have access," Riskive's Foster says. "There are a lot of processes in place on the government side and on the contractor side to safely handle that data," but if they have legitimate access, it's difficult to determine foul play.
How Are You Monitoring User Activity?
Reassessing user behavior and movement of data is another key best practice to helping minimize the risk of a big, sensitive insider leak.
Vulnerability assessments can help pinpoint potential danger zones or gaps, experts say, and data governance and specific data-handling processes are key.
Identity access management and data loss prevention (DLP) can help here. DLP products can be configured to prevent physical printing of certain documents, for instance, and USB ports can be disabled to prevent siphoning onto removable drives.
"Remote access systems don't have excellent reporting, so you'll typically have to dump logging and auditing off into a security event monitoring system and do some trending over time," Neohapsis' Hubbard says. "If you have some sort of centralized auditing tool, that's something very easy to start identifying thresholds for worker activity," he says.
But most of these controls are looking for outliers, not authorized users performing authorized actions, he says. Critical or classified files can be more closely monitored, too.
The trade-off, of course, is productivity. "The more you lock down environments, the more you damage workflow," Hubbard says.
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