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IT Wary of Insider Attacks as Economy Slows Down

Disgruntled employees and ex-workers pose increased threats to corporate systems

By Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld

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Several recent incidents show that the threat of data theft from insiders with privileged access should not be underestimated.

In July, Terry Childs, a disgruntled administrator working for the city of San Francisco, locked access to a critical network by resetting administrative passwords to its switches and routers. After he was caught, Childs refused to divulge the passwords for days.

In a similar incident last fall, Yung-Hsun Lin, a Unix systems administrator at Medco Health Solutions Inc. in Franklin Lakes, N.J., planted a logic bomb on an internal system that would have deleted data on 70 servers if it had gone off. Lin had feared he was going to be laid off from the health care provider.

Farrow noted that last year's theft of confidential data at Pilz was not an isolated incident -- the company was victimized by insiders at least two other times over the past couple of years. In one incident, minutes from a confidential board meeting were leaked to a major competitor, Farrow said.

The maker of automation technology has since deployed an enterprise rights management tool from Waltham, Mass.-based Liquid Machines Inc. to better limit access to confidential documents and control how that data can be used.

Analysts said that unless IT managers further beef up their defenses, such incidents are likely to continue.