Federal Tech Talk

Innovative ways to protect data from insider threats

Joe Payne, president and CEO of Code42, joined host John Gilroy on this week's Federal Tech Talk to discuss how his company can help federal agencies protect th...

February 8, 2021 8:35 am

1 min read

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This week on Federal Tech Talk, host John Gilroy interviewed Joe Payne, president, and CEO of Code42.

For the technical cognoscenti, there is no need to explain the name of the company. For the uninitiated, “42” is a well-known part of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the ultimate questions.

The question for federal information technology folks: How to detect insider threats? It is a valid question because organizations like Forrester say insider threats are responsible for 25% of data breaches. Further, the same research organization predicts that in 2021, that number will jump to 33%.

During the interview, Payne explained that traditional solutions like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) do not provide the kind of flexible response that newer systems provide. Even the common phrase User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) is not intelligent enough to help.

We all know that phishing attacks are up since the beginning of the COVID crisis. One popular method of leveraging this attack is to steal credentials. This is beginning to be so popular that a new term is being bandied about, synthetic identity, to describe when a criminal combines real and fake information to create a new identity.

Payne told some shocking stories about the unintended consequences of people transitioning from one company to another.