The Rise of Insider Threats in the Digital Landscape
In today’s era of digital transformation, an organization’s data has become the driving force behind its operations and future trajectory. As businesses increasingly rely on data to fuel innovation and productivity, the imperative task for security teams is safeguarding this invaluable resource from both external cyber threats and internal incidents.
Recent research highlights the ongoing issue of insider risks within organizations. Malicious insiders are often perceived as one of the least prepared causes of data security incidents by decision-makers. In fact, insider risks accounted for 26% of the security breaches reported in the past year, with over half of these incidents being intentional.
To secure data in diverse digital landscapes, including cloud environments and AI tools, detecting and mitigating data security risks arising from insiders has become a pivotal responsibility. Security teams must adopt a proactive approach to address this challenge, as 74% of organizations express a preference for semi- or fully automated risk mitigation before analysts can review alerts.
Introducing Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management is a powerful solution designed to help organizations identify, investigate, and mitigate potential insider threats within their Microsoft 365 environment. This comprehensive platform correlates various signals to detect malicious or inadvertent insider risks, such as IP theft, data leakage, and security violations.
Built with privacy by design, Insider Risk Management ensures user-level privacy through pseudonymization and robust role-based access controls, enabling organizations to balance security and productivity while prioritizing user trust.
Expanding Insider Risk Detection Across Cloud Environments
One of the key challenges faced by organizations today is the proliferation of cloud services, with an average of 147 public cloud services being used across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. To address this, Insider Risk Management now offers ready-to-use risk indicators to detect critical insider risks in Azure, AWS, and popular SaaS applications, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub.
By aggregating user activities across these diverse digital environments, Insider Risk Management provides security teams with a consolidated view of potential data security incidents. This eliminates the need for manual cross-referencing between systems, allowing for a more comprehensive and efficient approach to insider risk management.
Securing AI-Powered Productivity Tools
As businesses embrace AI to enhance productivity and drive innovation, it is essential for security teams to enable secure AI use. Insider Risk Management introduces a new indicator to detect the use of generative AI sites, allowing organizations to proactively identify and mitigate the potential data security risks associated with AI usage.
This capability enables security teams to gain visibility into the types of generative AI sites being accessed, the frequency of usage, and the users involved. By incorporating this information into their risk management strategy, organizations can take proactive steps to ensure the secure and responsible adoption of AI-powered tools.
Empowering Security Copilot for Comprehensive Investigations
Effective data security often requires collaboration between various teams, such as the security operations center (SOC) and the data security team. To streamline this collaboration, Insider Risk Management now integrates with Security Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered security assistant.
This integration allows SOC teams with the appropriate permissions to access user insights from Insider Risk Management during security investigations. By gaining access to user context and activity summaries, security teams can better understand the intent behind potential incidents, assess the impact on sensitive data, and respond more effectively to prevent further data breaches or unauthorized access.
Enhancing DLP Incident Management with Insider Risk Insights
Traditional data loss prevention (DLP) solutions often generate alerts based on specific conditions, such as when a user copies a confidential file to a USB device. However, these alerts typically lack the necessary context to understand the user’s intent and the broader sequence of actions leading to the incident.
To address this, Insider Risk Management now enriches DLP alerts with user context, providing a summary of the critical sequence of actions taken by the user. This includes details like downloading confidential files, downgrading sensitivity labels, and compressing the files before exfiltration. With this enhanced information, DLP or SOC analysts can better comprehend the user’s intent and make more informed decisions on how to respond to potential incidents.
Adaptive Protection: Dynamically Preventing Data Theft by Departing Employees
When employees leave a company, there is a heightened risk of data theft, as they may take company data with them, either with malicious intent or a sense of ownership over their work. To address this, Insider Risk Management’s Adaptive Protection feature now leverages the HR resignation date as a condition to calculate a user’s risk level.
By combining this information with other activity indicators that may lead to potential data security incidents, Adaptive Protection can proactively enforce stricter data loss prevention policies for departing employees. This helps organizations dynamically prevent data theft by high-risk users, ensuring the protection of critical business data.
Enhancing Insider Risk Management with Administrative Units and Policy Tuning
To enable organizations to establish a global insider risk program that respects local requirements, Insider Risk Management now supports administrative units. This feature allows administrators with the appropriate permissions to subdivide the organization into smaller units and assign specific administrators or role groups to manage only the members of those units.
Additionally, Insider Risk Management provides recommendations and sensitivity analysis to help admins set policy thresholds for certain user activities based on real-time analytics. This feature saves security teams time in fine-tuning policies and enables them to receive an optimal volume of high-fidelity alerts more quickly.
Conclusion: Empowering Data Security Teams to Proactively Manage Insider Risks
In the era of digital transformation, securing an organization’s data assets has become paramount. With the rise of insider threats posing a significant risk to data security, it is crucial for organizations to adopt a holistic approach to managing insider risks.
Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management offers a comprehensive solution that empowers security teams to detect, investigate, and mitigate potential insider threats across diverse digital environments, including cloud services and AI-powered productivity tools. By integrating with Security Copilot and enhancing DLP incident management, Insider Risk Management provides security teams with the necessary context and insights to respond effectively to data security incidents.
Furthermore, the administrative units and policy tuning capabilities in Insider Risk Management enable organizations to tailor their insider risk management strategies to their unique business requirements and regulatory landscapes, ensuring a seamless and effective implementation.
As organizations continue to navigate the challenges posed by insider threats, Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management stands as a powerful tool to help security teams proactively secure their Microsoft 365 environment and protect their most valuable asset: their data.
Securing Your Microsoft 365 Environment with Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management: Key Takeaways
- Insider threats pose a significant risk to organizations, accounting for 26% of security breaches, with over half being intentional.
- Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management helps organizations identify, investigate, and mitigate potential insider threats within their Microsoft 365 environment.
- The solution offers ready-to-use risk indicators to detect critical insider risks across cloud environments, including Azure, AWS, and popular SaaS applications.
- Insider Risk Management introduces a new indicator to detect the use of generative AI sites, enabling proactive mitigation of data security risks associated with AI usage.
- The integration with Security Copilot allows security teams to access user insights from Insider Risk Management during investigations, enhancing their understanding of potential incidents.
- Insider Risk Management enriches DLP alerts with user context, providing a summary of the critical sequence of actions leading to potential data security incidents.
- Adaptive Protection leverages HR resignation dates to dynamically prevent data theft by departing employees, ensuring the protection of critical business data.
- Administrative units and policy tuning capabilities in Insider Risk Management enable organizations to tailor their insider risk management strategies to their unique requirements.
By leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management, organizations can proactively secure their Microsoft 365 environment and effectively manage the growing threat of insider risks in the digital landscape.
