This week, cybersecurity provider Netskope released the July 2021 Netskope Cloud and Threat Report, the latest installment of Netskope Threat Labs’ biannual research analyzing critical trends in enterprise cloud service and app use, web and cloud-enabled threats, and cloud data migrations and transfers.
The results revealed that some departing employees present disproportionately significant cloud security risks. In their last 30 days of employment, workers have been proven to be uploading three times more data than usual to personal cloud apps.
Commenting on the news, Robert Golladay, an EMEA and APAC director at Illusive, offered the following insight:
“Netskope’s finding that employees are adding 3X more data to personal applications in the last month of their employment should be a wake-up call for any companies that aren’t prioritizing insider threats. Companies need specific policies outlining the process for ‘logging off’ from their networks as employees leave and need to establish methods for managing risk of outgoing workers. Conducting red team exercises to help trace the paths back to critical assets can help security teams identify the holes in their systems and vulnerabilities ex-employees can take advantage of.
In addition to data theft on departure, there’s other exposure and risk that an insider’s knowledge creates for an organisation. An insider’s credentials and environment information represent an attractive alternative route to create a beachhead for threat actors looking to get their hands on the crown jewels. It’s important for organisations to have a strategy to detect insider threat indicators that often manifest as “crimes of opportunity.”
