Digital Risk Assessments to Identify Insider Threats

A digital risk assessment involves evaluating potential threats and vulnerabilities within an individuals digital life. This process includes identifying sensitive data, understanding the impact of a security breach, and assessing the likelihood of various risks (i.e. how likely am I to be hacked, have my identity stolen, or have fraud committed against me etc). By examining an individuals digital footprint, it is possible to determine areas that require enhancement to mitigate the impact of cyber threats.

Our particular form of digital risk assessment doesn’t look at your computer hardware, but more specifically looks at your digital footprint, and how that can be used against you - whether that is in your work or home environment.

A recent request for a digital risk assessment by an individual in the research sector entailed looking at not just their digital footprint - and determining the risk that posed to them, but also at their very close associates to ensure there were no identifiable threats to themselves or their research. Background checks had been performed initially during recruitment, and everyone had a clean bill of health.

So, when assessing close associates, we were able to look at their initial digital footprint and then focus on any actions that may have compromised the safety of the client or their research. Almost everyone had no red flags, except one person.

That one individual had an almost perfect profile, except they were accessing hacker forums. A recent data leak by hackers of a popular data sharing forum identified several hundred thousand users who accessed the site for various reasons - the main reason being to share hacked data - and this associate was on that list. This ‘hacked data’ contains information on millions, if not billions, of people - and based on the activity within the forums public information, it could be seen that the close associate was actively tying to acquire data from other hackers.

The associates identity was confirmed through their poor use of security techniques when accessing the hacker forums.