The Risk from Insiders

There has been a lot of coverage of the role of a system administrator in the recent release of information about the National Security Administration's intelligence gathering methods. Regardless what you think about the methods that were revealed, information security professionals need to take a hard look at the sorts of exposures that exist due to organizational insiders.

Snowden's position as a system administrator is just the most recent high-profile insider who betrayed his employer's trust. His removal of documents on a thumb drive was viewed as unsuspicious precisely because of his job function.

As long as we have an IT infrastructure, the people who manage it will be in a privileged position. IT professionals recognize the risk; four of five professionals in a recent survey list insiders as the greatest source of risk to the environment.

The same methods that are used elsewhere in the security landscape will help to control and mitigate the risk from insiders. At a high level, there are three steps that need to be taken:

1. Data Classification: Identify the types of data in your environment, and what the confidentiality, integrity and availability requirements are for each type of data. NIST 800-60 can provide some guidance here.
2. Establish Control Standards: For the different types of data, we need to describe the measures that are taken to protect the data.
3. Audit: The controls need to be evaluated for effectiveness, and the organization's compliance with the the controls must be verified on a regular basis.

Controls

There are several publicly available documents outlining control best practices and standards. Here are a few:

• NIST 800-53
• PCI Security Standards

Some common controls include:

• Physical access controls: Things like security guards, mantraps, proximity card systems, and combination locks on doors control physical access to sensitive areas and systems.
• Logical access controls: In general, people should only have the level of access required for their jobs. Access controls should be as granular as possible, and high-level access should require extra levels of approval and scrutiny. Two-factor authentication should be in place for access to sensitive facilities.
• Personnel management: Some common measures include criminal background checks, periodic security awareness training, contractual attestations, and organizational communications.
• Separation of duties: Where possible, access should be limited to particular functions, and functions should be defined to limit access to sensitive data. In general, developers should not have access to production, system administrators don't need database access, application administrators don't need system-level access, and only the people who manage the hardware and network need physical access to the systems.
• Network security: The network should be segmented appropriately, and firewall rules should be in place to restrict traffic between different security zones.
• Workstations and laptops: Hard drives should have robust encryption and strong password policies should be in place. The types of data that are permitted for local storage should be established and monitored. The ability of end users to install applications needs to be restricted. Patches, anti-virus updates, and security workarounds need to be applied regularly.
• Backups and continuity: Data needs to be protected by a combination of archival backups, long-distance replication, and local disk mirroring/RAID-ing.
• Logging and auditing: Logs need to be collected to measure the effectiveness of these controls, and the logs need to be reviewed on a regular basis.

Some controls should get particular attention as directly addressing the issue of insider-led breaches.

It is bad enough that the security training level of such government employees is not monitored by the DHS. (Most parts of the private sector also don't track administrator security training, for that matter). Beyond carelessness or incompetence, employers need to consider the direct risks posed by their most trusted employees.