How to prevent internal hacking

In this contest, an insider threat may know from his or her own experience the policies and practices of the organization's IT staff—and the insider can take advantage of that knowledge, perhaps by leaking to hacker allies vulnerability information that the insider knows the IT team will take too long to remediate.

With proactive vulnerability management, IT teams can reliably repair security flaws, negating the advantage insider threats may have. It may be surprising, but common sources of digital compromises are legitimate but inactive user accounts. Imagine a staff member has been fired, but his or her account has not been terminated.

The disgruntled employee can still log in to access the organization's assets. But if IT teams monitor and control user accounts carefully, they can prevent such a dangerous situation.

Network security monitoring analyzes an organization's digital traffic to raise red flags if any of the activity is suspicious—and that includes user account activity such as logging in and logging out. For example, EiQ's SOCVue reports atypical use of user accounts so that IT teams can be well aware that something unusual is going on and take defensive steps.

These security controls are well-studied ways for organizations to realistically defend their IT assets. These days it seems that every time you open your favorite news source there is another data breach related headline. With all this publicity and the increasing awareness of the general public about how data breaches can impact their personal privacy and financial wellbeing, it is no surprise that there is a lot of interest in preventing hacking.

The trouble is that there is no way to prevent others from attempting to hack into any target they chose. Since there is a practically limitless number of targets to choose from, the attacker need only be lucky or skilled enough to succeed once.

In addition, the risk of successful prosecution of perpetrators remains low. At this point, lets differentiate between opportunistic attacks and targeted attacks. Opportunistic attacks are largely automated, low-complexity exploits against known vulnerable conditions and configurations. Ever wonder why a small business with a small geographic footprint and almost no online presence gets compromised? Chances are good they just had the right combination of issues that an automated attack bot was looking to exploit.

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Change default passwords immediately. Some software has built-in passwords to allow the first login after installation; it is extremely unwise to leave it unchanged. Identify entry points. Install proper scanning software programs to identify all entry points from the internet into the internal network of the company. Any attack to the network needs to start from these points.

Identifying these entry points, however, is not at all an easy task. It is better to take the help of skilled ethical hackers who have taken special network security training to perform this task successfully. Perform attack and penetration tests. By running the attack and penetration tests, you can identify those vulnerable points in the network that can be easily accessed from both external and internal users.

After identifying these points, you would be able to thwart attacks from external sources and correct the pitfalls that could become the entry points for intruders to hack into your network.

The test must be done from both the internal as well as external perspectives to detect all the vulnerable points. Make user-awareness campaigns. All possible steps must be taken to make all the users of the network aware of the pitfalls of security and the necessary security practices to minimize these risks. You can conduct social-engineering tests to determine the user awareness.

Until all the users are aware of certain factors related to the network, protection cannot be carried out in the true sense of the term. Configure firewalls. A firewall, if not configured properly, can act like an open door for an intruder. Hence, it is vitally important to set the rules to allow traffic through the firewall that is important to the business. A firewall must have its own configurations depending upon the security aspect of your organization.

From time to time, proper analysis of the composition and nature of the traffic itself is also necessary to maintain security. Implement and use password policies. Use strong passwords by using at least 12 characters. Use password-less authentication. Regardless of the policies above, passwords are less secure than SSH or VPN keys, so think about using these or similar technologies instead.

Where possible, use smart cards and other advanced methods. Delete comments in website source code. Comments used in source code may contain indirect information that can help crack the site and sometimes even usernames and passwords.

All the comments in source code that look inaccessible to external users should also be removed as there are some techniques to view the source code of nearly all web applications.

Remove unnecessary services from devices.