You may have thought that misuse of privilege is a victim less crime and no one will care. Just ask former Goldman Sachs programmer, Sergey Aleynikov what he is doing for the next 8 years and then decide for yourself.
That's right, Mr. Aleynikov was convicted and received a sentence of eight years for stealing proprietary software source code as he was leaving the company in order to sell those assets to the competition for about $1.2M. Back in December of 2010 we first blogged about this situation to highlight the dangers in insider attacks. We have also spent a lot of time on the cost of insider attacks in general.
The only bright spot for Mr. Aleynikov was that the maximum sentence possible was 10 years, so I guess with those other two years he can figure out even more creative ways to prove insider threats are in fact the most costly
Hopefully you, dear reader, will take this lesson to heart and implement a least privilege solution across desktop, server, virtual and cloud environments throughout your extended enterprise and remove the temptation to misuse privilege for personal gain. That way you (or any or your coworkers) will have have to face a jail sentence of 8-10 years for misuse of privilege. You should also reread the latest Poneman Study to remind yourself of the other costs to your organization and then contact your BeyondTrust representative to see what a least privilege solution can do for you.
Scott Lang, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at BeyondTrust
Scott Lang has nearly 20 years of experience in technology product marketing, currently guiding the product marketing strategy for BeyondTrust’s privileged account management solutions and vulnerability management solutions. Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott was director of security solution marketing at Dell, formerly Quest Software, where he was responsible for global security campaigns, product marketing for identity and access management and Windows server management.
