On September 8, 2022, I was featured in a Security Magazine article.
To account for internal threats, there must be a mindset shift in what constitutes an organization’s threat landscape. Most companies focus exclusively on external threats and view their own people as trustworthy. As a result, insider threats are often under-addressed cybersecurity threats within organizations. We learned with SolarWinds that detecting such a threat is vastly different from traditional pen testing, code review or other vulnerability detection techniques.
Security teams need to move from only looking for vulnerabilities to also looking for suspicious or malicious code. With a vulnerability, the threat actor interacts with the attack surface in a way that exploits a weakness. With malicious code, the threat actor is either choosing or creating the attack surface and functionality because they have control over the system internally.
So, instead of the threat actor exploiting vulnerabilities in the attack surface, now the threat actor creates the attack surface and exercises the functionality that they implement. Failing to implement threat modeling that studies potential threats to both vulnerabilities and malicious code can set your organization up with a false sense of security.
Read the full article here: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/98307-national-insider-threat-awareness-month-2022
