Technology leaks are the order of the day. A more convenient than others, but in principle it is a breach of employment contract, especially if it is a theft of information from a company to its competition. This and other purposes have caused the attacks by employees to their own businesses to increase in recent years, as the latter suffered Snapchat, but the monitoring software have advanced in parallel.
Established standards and employee knowledge, is completely legal that a company uses a service – level monitoring software usage by workers. This makes theft and other actions not allowed to be made more subtle and indirect way, but how these surveillance software can detect an attack before it is committed?
These monitoring software usually complete solutions that offer various services or levels of monitoring depending on which company concerned. If we look for example the case of Palantir, we see that has specific solutions for cyber attacks, anti-fraud and some specifically for certain sectors (health or markets), and one of them relates to data detection (Theft Insider Threats).
What they do is offer the company are software usage patterns of each employee having to end an idea of the behavior of the same or of your routine. The company can see the web sites you access, e-mail, VPN or activity of external devices that connect among other things, based on a pattern that alerts are set when there are variations.
You are weird, is something wrong?
Gradually we will all be aware that the content of our communications is likely to be read or revised, much as in the case of an email. We have shown if we use a mail client like Gmail, which will show us related to a topic that we discussed in the emails, and obviously, it is no coincidence ads.
But in this case the key is not to examine the text per, or at least not only that, but detect a change in our pattern of use. Explains Brian White, COO of REDOWL Analytics (surveillance software) in Quartz that the key to the prediction that an employee will commit theft of information or something similar are the changes in their behavior.
Other behaviors that can betray is an increase in external mails or the fact finish before our work activity, the probability that these hours within the company can be harnessed to tackle information theft. White explains that although there are peaks of activity (or inactivity) occasionally, usually have a routine regarding schedules and activity (such as the number of mails sent).
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More and more attacks and more methods
In a study of Intel collect information from various security companies regarding attacks and robberies. These data extracted that are even more external than internal, but they are responsible for 43% of data theft, accidental being the half. According to his data is often still resort to physical (USB and portable especially) methods, but the most common format is Microsoft Office documents.
It is therefore logical that these softwares are used to help detect possible theft, although we saw a while ago with a simple phone (even smartphone) could intercept information from computers. Of course, in these cases they require advanced computer skills having to install malware.
A help, not a self-employed human resources
White says that an increase in external mails can also be a sign that the employee is considering other jobs, which is not something illegal or fraudulent although not favorable for the company. This is an example that not all irregular guidelines represent an intention against the company and that may be false positives, there is only an aid in production and no single method of detection.
The debate is to what extent monitoring may be sufficient for the company to undertake preventive actions penalty with the employee. That is, these changes may act as suspicious pattern yellow cards. And if so, how should they be necessary to draw a red? These softwares are already common in banks or companies cooperating with governments or departments of defense, but it is conceivable that they will be increasingly common, seeing the growing trend to automation.
Tags: company, software
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