Private Air New York

www.privateairny.com Private Air New York | Winter 2016 55 SECURITY By: Val LeTellier INSIDER THREAT PROGRAMS: INCREASINGLY VALUABLE TO THE HIGH-NET WORTH COMMUNITY I t was classic betrayal. It was someone you thought shared your beliefs, your vision and your goals. It was someone who worked late with you to finish projects, with whom you had a shared future, and you shared meals. Most importantly, it was someone you trusted. Now you have a nightmare on your hands. Maybe it's stolen funds or intellectual property. Or maybe it's sensitive data that can harm your reputation or that of your family, partners or clients. What you do know is that it's going to cost you, both in terms of money and time, to repair the damage. What you don't know is how you could have prevented it. Better yet, you don't know how to prevent it next time. And despite your optimism that there won't be a next time, the news tells you that this is a growing trend that you need to pay attention to. While you may never have experienced the above-noted situation, the likelihood is growing that you and others will. e Panama Papers are the latest wake-up call in a growing trend of insiders taking matters into their own hands and releasing volumes of data to the public domain where they can be judged in courtrooms or courts of public opinion. Powering these events are readily available technologies that make it far easier to move large amounts of data anonymously. Meanwhile, insiders are learning from WikiLeaks and others to maximize their effectiveness and achieve their personal goals. Notably, the insider responsible for the largest leak in history – the 11.5 million files stolen from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonesca – was never met by the journalist who received the documents, and as of today remains anonymous to him, his newspaper and the world. Moving from that situation to your own, it's clear that the financial stature that you, your family and your organization enjoy is increasingly known to a wide spectrum of hostile actors. ese groups have vast resources and a wide array of sophisticated methods to steal your personal data, funds, and damage your reputation. e exponential growth in global connectivity means that more and more persons have indirect access to you and your family, whether as contractors, friends, or associates. Additionally, the Internet of ings (IoT) introduces a slew of new vulnerabilities into your life, and every new connected device means a new vector for an attack. Finally, hacking is becoming capitalized and democratized as hackers and malware programmers sell their online. Activists are making use of these services and online anonymity, sparking a global rise in hacktivism. So, getting back to the question of what you can do about it. Many large organizations have an insider threat program (or elements of one) in their IT, security or HR departments. Smaller organizations, family offices, families and individuals can also benefit from such a program. In fact, the benefit may be far greater, as an inside attack can be far more ruinous to an individual or small organization that is completely reliant on their reputation or peer group stature. In these cases, the damage done by the insider may be so significant that it takes years to recover what is lost. By its very nature, an insider threat program is best crafted and implemented by outside experts. is is mainly because it's counterintuitive to expect those closest to the situation to be objective about potential threats from those that they work with or know socially. Outsider experts are more readily able to assess situations and people on logic and facts, and without emotion or prejudgment. ey know what people are capable of, and bring their own catalogue of indicators

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