Study: Rethink the Outsider Threat

78 percent of attackers in these cases did their dirty deeds from a home PC with stolen credentials, rather than any sophisticated hacking techniques.

84 percent of computer crimes could have been prevented if the computer that was broken into had been verified as an authorized device.

Most attackers have no relationship to the victim, which goes against conventional wisdom that the insider threat is the real security risk.

"Many of the crimes were perpetrated by insiders using these outside computers," says Bill Bosen, an analyst with Trusted Strategies who wrote the report. "This study showed 57 percent of crimes came from outsiders. That's still a very hefty number of insiders involved."

"It's pretty clear that there is a weak standard for authentication in enterprises today," says Pete Lindstrom, research director for Spire Security, who notes that the Trusted Strategies report mostly focuses on extreme cases of damage to organizations. "Computer-identity verification is useful in some circumstances, but any prescriptive measure must be evaluated based on the threat model. There are many other forms of authentication that could be just as useful."

User privileges, meanwhile, are a powerful tool for attackers. In one case mentioned in the report, a convicted attacker had used stolen IDs and passwords to gain access to administrative accounts at an unnamed company. From there, he deleted all of its manufacturing software programs, ringing up $10 million in damages.

"The focus in government and industry has been on the network and combating viruses and worms. They've spent a lot of money on that and have a robust infrastructure now," says Robert Rodriguez, former assistant special agent for the U.S. Secret Service in charge of the San Francisco district, where he headed up an electronic trends task force for the agency. "But applications and other vulnerability areas have bad guys," says Rodriquez, who is now principal, Rodriquez and Associates.

According to Lindstrom, one reason the user privilege method is more costly than malware breaches is that security tools have made some headway protecting networks against malware.

And most organizations that were attacked had checked user ID and password credentials, according to the report, but not whether the computer that got in was legit. Among those attacks, 78 percent were committed from the attacker's home and 5 percent on-site. Some 17 percent of the cases didn't specify where the attack originated.

But in about 16 percent of these cases, checking the authenticity of the machine wouldn't have halted the breach because these attacks were either from insiders, or they were denial-of-service and other malware attacks that don't use logons.

Outside attackers committed 79 percent of the crimes where user accounts were infiltrated and former employees were the perpetrators in 21 percent of these types of breaches. And overall, 57 percent of attackers had no relationship with the victim organizations, 22 percent were former employees, 14 were current employees, and 7 percent had a customer or supplier relationship or similar "connection" to the victimized organization.

Government (23 percent), retail (22 percent), high tech (20 percent), and financial (16 percent) were the top victims of attacks, according to the report.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

Spire Security LLC

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: PTEC)