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Book Review: Insider Threat
http://books.slashdot.org/books/06/01/06/1421243.shtml

Author: Eric Cole and Sandra Ring
Pages: 397
Publisher: Syngress
Rating: 9
Reviewer: Ben Rothke
ISBN: 1597490482  [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597490482/c4iorg]
Summary: Excellent overview of the insider threat to networks and
information systems

The retail and gambling sectors have long understood the danger of the
insider threat and have built their security frameworks to protect
against both the insider and the outsider. Shoplifters are a huge bane
to the retail industry, exceeded only by thefts from internal
employees behind the registers. The cameras and guards in casinos are
looking at both those in front of and behind the gambling tables.
Casinos understand quite well that when an employee is spending 40
hours a week at their location dealing with hundreds of thousands of
dollars; over time, they will learn where the vulnerabilities and
weaknesses are. For a minority of these insiders, they will commit
fraud, which is invariably much worse than any activity an outsider
could alone carry out.

Insider Threat is mainly a book of real-life events that detail how
the insider threat is a problem that affects every organization in
every industry. In story after story, the book details how trusted
employees will find weaknesses in systems in order to carry out
financial or political attacks against their employers. It is the
responsibility to the organization to ensure that their infrastructure
is designed to detect these insiders and their systems resilient
enough to defend against them. This is clearly not a trivial task.

The authors note that the crux of the problem is that many
organizations tend to think that once they hire an employee or
contractor, that the person is now part of a trusted group of
dedicated and loyal employees. Given that many organizations don't
perform background checks on their prospective employees, they are
placing a significant level of trust in people they barely know. While
the vast majority of employees can be trusted and are honest, the
danger of the insider threat is that it is the proverbial bad apple
that can take down the entire tree. The book details numerous stories
of how a single bad employee has caused a company to go out of
business. <snip>

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