Internal threats are the hole in Cybersecurity’s donut - Frank Vukovits - ESW #438

Interview with Frank Vukovits: Focusing inward: there lie threats also

External threats get discussed more than internal threats. There’s a bit of a streetlight effect here: external threats are more visible, easier to track, and sharing external threat intelligence doesn’t infringe on any individual organization’s privacy. That’s why we hear the industry discuss external threats more, though internally-triggered incidents far outnumber external ones.

Internal threats, on the other hand, can get personal. Accidental leaks are embarassing. Malicious insiders are a sensitive topic that internal counsel would erase from company memory if they could. Even when disclosure is required, the lawyers are going to minimize the amount of detail that gets out.

I was chief incident handler for 5 years of my enterprise career, and never once had to deal with an external threat. I managed dozens of internal cases over those 5 years though.

In this interview, we discuss the need for strong internal controls with Frank Vukovits from Delinea.

As systems and users inside and outside organizations become increasingly connected, maintaining strong security controls is essential to protect data and systems from both internal and external threats. In this episode, we will explore the importance of strong internal controls around business application security and how they can best be integrated into a broader security program to ensure true enterprise security.

This segment is sponsored by Delinea.

Visit https://securityweekly.com/delinea to learn more about them!

Topic Segment: Personal Disaster Recovery

Many of us depend on service providers for our personal email, file storage, and photo storage. The line between personal accounts and work accounts often blur, particularly when it comes to Apple devices. We’re way more dependent on our Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Google accounts than we used to be. They’re necessary to use home voice assistants, to log into other SaaS applications (Log in with Google/Apple/FB), and even manage our wireless plans (e.g. Google Fi). Getting locked out of any of these accounts can bring someone’s personal and/or work life to a halt, and there are many cases of this happening.

I’m not sure if we make it past sharing stories about what can and has happened. Getting into solutions might have to be a separate discussion (also, we may not have any solutions…)

• Friend of the show and sometimes emergency co-host Guillaume posted about this recently
• A romance author got locked out of her books
• A 79 year old got locked out of her iPad with all her family photos. Sadly, this is one of the most common scenarios. Someone either forgets their pin and locks out the device permanently, or a family member dies and didn’t tell anyone their passwords or pins, so the surviving family can’t access data, pay the bills, etc.
• Google example: Claims of CSAM material after father documents toddler at doctor’s request https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked
• Dec 2025 Apple example: she tried to redeem a gift card that had been tampered with: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
• Google example: developer lost all his work, because he was working on preventing revenge porn and other sensitive cases, and was building a better model to detect NSFW images: https://medium.com/@russoatlarge_93541/i-built-a-privacy-app-google-banned-me-over-a-dataset-used-in-ai-research-66bc0dfb2310
• My partner’s mom’s Instagram account got hacked. Meta locked out all of it (Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook) and she couldn’t get it reinstated. They wouldn’t even let her open a NEW account.

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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-438