Defense Against the Dark Web: A focus on Insider Threats

In this illuminating episode of “Defense Against the Dark Web,” Cybersixgill’s Intelligence Research Lead, Dov Lerner, joins host Delilah Schwartz to take listeners deep inside the hidden world of insider threats. Lerner, who conducted extensive research tracking the activities of malicious insiders and their threat actor recruiters across the deep and dark web, shares surprising findings about the diverse array of threats that can originate from within an organization’s walls.

From petty scams perpetrated with the help of employees in retail, telecommunications and shipping industries to audacious attempts by threat actors to recruit insiders in financial institutions or government entities with high-level access and security clearances, Lerner illustrates how these “wolves in sheep’s clothing” can quietly inflict harm from inside an organization’s networks without detection.

Lerner also offers perspective on industries most impacted, common insider tactics, and the challenges of prevention against insiders who intimately understand their targets’ systems, processes and security protocols. These insider threats, according to Lerner, often go undetected, but collectively result in significant losses - likening these incidents to a ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’.

For those tasked with cyber defense, Lerner offers a sobering perspective on the challenges of detecting these stealthy insider threats, and suggests several defensive strategies that can be implemented to protect against them. In this in-depth podcast discussion with host Delilah Schwartz, Lerner peels back the layers on one of the most pernicious yet underreported threats to the organizational attack surface - insider threats operating from within.