In the world of cybersecurity, insider threats remain a potent and often underestimated danger. These threats can emanate not only from malicious actors within an organization but also from well-intentioned employees who inadvertently compromise security with a mis-click or other unwitting action. Having spent many years in system administrator-type roles, I'm actually surprised at how easy it remains for significant outages to come about, and the worst ones aren't always the ones that cause huge blinking red lights initially but, in fact, are lingering silently in the background just waiting for an auditor – or worse, a criminal – to uncover.
Lest you think this sounds like a setup for an unnecessarily seasonal, Halloween-themed "IT horror" post, I wanted to share a tale of a real-world security incident that underscores why file integrity monitoring and regular compliance audits matter and can help you in thwarting insider threats, even when the threat is merely an accidental misconfiguration.