Organizations spent an estimated 122.45 billion USD in 2016 on cybersecurity defense solutions and services, in a never-ending effort to procure better firewalls, anti-malware tools, and intrusion detection and prevention systems to keep hackers out of their networks. However, recent industry studies clearly demonstrate that threats posed by insiders (whether through malice or negligent conduct) dwarf those from the outside.
In fact, industry experts assert that employees are inadvertently causing corporate data breaches and leaks daily. The Ponemon Institute recently surveyed hundreds of companies in its 2016 Cost of Data Breach Study. Among 874 incidents, the survey revealed that 568 were caused by employee or contractor negligence; 191 by malicious insiders and only 85 incidents purely attributed to outsiders.
An insider is any individual who has authorized access to corporate networks, systems or data. This may include employees, contractors, or others with permission to access an organizations’ systems. With the increased volume of data and increased sophistication and determination of attackers looking to exploit unwitting and even recruit malicious insiders, businesses are more susceptible to insider threats than ever before.
The most serious and often devastating cybersecurity incidents are usually related to “spear phishing” attacks, which are comprised of targeted and often highly customized electronic communications sent to specific individuals in a business that appear to come from a trusted individual or business. The targeted insider is often tricked into disclosing their passwords, providing highly sensitive information, or installing malware on their computer. These attacks tend to be successful because they are so customized and are designed to evade traditional cybersecurity defenses.
Much of the evidence and other indications of spear phishing and malicious insider incidents are not found in firewall logs and typically cannot be flagged or blocked by intrusion detection or intrusion prevention systems. Instead, much of that information is found in the emails and locally stored documents of end users spread throughout the enterprise. To detect, identify and effectively respond to insider threats, organizations need to be able to search across this data in an effective and scalable manner. Additionally, proactive search efforts can identify potential security violations such as misplaced sensitive IP, or personal customer data or even password “cheat sheets” stored in local documents.
To date, organizations have employed limited technical approaches to try and identify unstructured distributed data stored across the enterprise, enduring many struggles. For instance, forensic software agent-based crawling methods are commonly attempted but cause repeated high user computer resource utilization for each search initiated and network bandwidth limitations are being pushed to the limits rendering this approach ineffective. So being able to search and audit across at least several hundred distributed end points in a repeatable and quick fashion is effectively impossible under this approach.
What has always been needed is gaining immediate visibility into unstructured distributed data across the enterprise, through the ability to search and report across several thousand endpoints and other unstructured data sources, and return results within minutes instead of days or weeks. None of the traditional approaches come close to meeting this requirement. This requirement, however, can be met by the latest innovations in enterprise eDiscovery software.
X1 Distributed Discovery (X1DD) represents a unique approach, by enabling enterprises to quickly and easily search across multiple distributed endpoints from a central location. Legal, cybersecurity, and compliance teams can easily perform unified complex searches across both unstructured content and metadata, obtaining statistical insight into the data in minutes, instead of days or weeks. With X1DD, organizations can proactively or reactively search for confidential data leakage and also keyword signatures of customized spear phishing attacks. Built on our award-winning and patented X1 Search technology, X1DD is the first product to offer true and massively scalable distributed searching that is executed in its entirety on the end-node computers for data audits across an organization. This game-changing capability vastly reduces costs and quickens response times while greatly mitigating risk and disruption to operations.
X1DD operates on-demand where your data currently resides — on desktops, laptops, servers, or even the Cloud — without disruption to business operations and without requiring extensive or complex hardware configurations.
Beyond providing enterprise eDiscovery and information governance functionality for an organization, employees benefit from having use of the award-winning X1 Search product to improve their productivity, with the added benefit of allowing the business to address the prevalent cybersecurity gap in addressing spear phishing attacks and other insider threats.