Today, source code protection is top-of-mind for IT engineering managers. According to Elevate Research, there is an upward trend in attack rates (142%) for engineers, which accelerated starting around April 2022. Attackers know that social engineered attacks on developers can produce direct access to source code, giving them maximum leverage and the ability to inject backdoors for long-term persistence.
(Source: Giphy)
But how are hackers able to infiltrate networks and systems so easily? Through sophisticated social engineering tactics that can trick nearly any workforce user into accidentally sharing the keys to the kingdom. Given the automation already available, and the rapid advance in attack sophistication, traditional security training and technologies are no longer strong enough to keep the threat actors at bay.
Data shows that cybercriminals are manipulating and tricking your people right now. It’s time to take a new approach to source code protection with insider risk management.
The Escalation of Social Engineering Attacks on Engineers
Listen, cybercriminals are no fools—they specifically target accounts and people who will lead them to the most lucrative assets. And since IT engineers and developers have access to application code, they’re becoming cybercriminals’ number one target.
(Source: Giphy)
In July 2022, attackers targeted IT engineers 8x more often than non-engineers. And since April 2022, social engineering attacks on IT engineers, on average, have increased 1.42x from 5.79 times per month per engineer to 8.25 times per month. Even Microsoft reports that the IT department is the most at risk of experiencing a social engineering attack, with 60% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed in agreement.
Here’s what we’ve come to realize:
- Highly attacked workforce users have a higher potential to unintentionally trigger a security breach
- Now more than ever, it’s critical to pinpoint risky individuals in your organization and tailor safeguards to protect them
- Source code protection starts with protecting your people
What is Insider Risk Management? We Believe it’s the Key to Source Code Protection
“Because employees are so often the targets of attacks, organizations need a way to understand that risk at an individual level,” states Elevate Security’s Co-Founder and CEO, Robert Fry. “Every company needs to measure, historically, the risk of every employee. We can’t manage what we can’t measure and if 82% of breaches are due to human error, we better start measuring it.”
Insider risk management refers to your organization’s ability to protect itself against cyberattacks by measuring insider risk to identify the users most likely to trigger a security incident or fall for a social engineering attack.
Recently, Microsoft made the statement, “Managing internal risks can be challenging because it requires analyzing millions of daily signals to detect potentially risky user actions that may lead to a data security incident.”
Workforce risk mitigation tools, like Elevate Security, identify and respond proactively to an organization’s riskiest users, providing security teams and department managers with the visibility and action plans necessary to prevent the next security breach.
(Source: Giphy)
How Does Insider Risk Management Aid in Source Code Protection?
With the right insider risk management tool, analysis of data from existing identity, email, device, web, and other security tools provides a comprehensive risk profile of each user informed by historical actions and attackability.
A user’s actions include clicking on malicious links, downloading malware, or engaging with phishing emails. Attackability, on the other hand, is the likelihood of the user being targeted. For example, an IT engineer has higher attackability than a user in marketing because the engineer often has privileged access to the company’s source code.
To prevent threat actors from applying social engineering to reach your source code, it’s important to implement technology that can get to the root of the issue. The right solution will:
- Identify risky users and predict when and how attackers will go after them
- Apply risk-tailored safeguards to protect them and the organization
- Automate personalized feedback to users and managers
By tailoring security to each individual IT engineer’s risk level, you can get ahead of the hackers and reduce the possibility of social engineered attacks. With individualized protection for IT engineers and developers, threat actors have fewer opportunities to manipulate these users into accidentally allowing access into their systems.
With insider risk management, source code protection has never been simpler.
(Source: Giphy)
➡️ To dive deeper into the data inflows and outflows of the Elevate Security Platform, check out our eBook, Unintentional Insider Risk Mitigation: How Elevate Security Protects the Enterprise From the Inside Out.
Final Thoughts
Protecting your source code is challenging—we get it. To better protect your source code, you need to first understand the IT engineers and developers who access it. What are their individual risk levels? How do their actions impact the risk level of the entire department?
The Elevate Security Platform identifies the riskiest engineers in your organization to mitigate the risk of your source code falling into the wrong hands. In light of recent events, we’re offering a rapid assessment of your internal risk across multiple threats, including social engineering. Sign up to get your assessment—it’ll be up and running within 24 hours!
