The Elusive Insider Threat: Tracing Data Exfiltration Beyond the Corporate Network
What began as a routine review of employee activity expanded into a broader investigation that traced company data beyond the corporate environment and across multiple personal platforms.
The Challenge
A company identified suspicious activity involving a departing employee who copied a large volume of files to an external drive shortly before termination. While the organization secured the employee’s work laptop, it remained unclear what happened to the data after it left the company’s environment.
The client needed evidence of whether the files had been accessed, copied, or transferred elsewhere to assess the risk to its intellectual property and sensitive information.
Our Approach
Aletheian Labs analyzed the former employee’s work laptop, external drive, and related system artifacts.
Our forensic examination revealed that the external drive contained macOS artifacts but no evidence of Windows usage. By correlating activity across the laptop and drive, we built a detailed timeline that uncovered a critical finding: files on the drive continued showing access activity ten days after the employee’s corporate access had been revoked.
This indicated the drive had been connected to another computer outside the company after the employee’s access had been revoked, extending the investigation beyond the company’s environment.
The Breakthrough
- Proved post-termination access to the external drive
- Confirmed data movement beyond the corporate environment
- Expanded the scope of the investigation to additional devices and accounts
- Located company data across personal devices, cloud services, and personal email accounts
- Helped the client regain control of sensitive and proprietary information before additional misuse could occur
