scholarly journals Enemies within: Redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S Wall
Author(s):  
Ahmed Awad E. Ahmed

In recent years, many studies have highlighted the unprecedented growth in security threats from multiple and varied sources faced by corporate, as well as governmental organizations. People inside the organization with ready access to confidential or proprietary data can easily violate the organization security policy, maliciously or inadvertently, without being caught. In order to protect their reputation and valuable assets, many organizations take the dramatic but necessary step of deploying and operating employee surveillance and monitoring tools within their network perimeters. In this chapter, we discuss employee surveillance schemes from both technological and legal perspectives. We argue that keystroke dynamics could be used to fight effectively against insider threat, and as such it could play an important role in employee surveillance. We present a keystroke recognition scheme based on free text detection that goes beyond the traditional approach of using keystroke dynamics for authentication or employee performance evaluation, and consider using such information for dynamic user profiling. The generated profiles can be used to identify reliably perpetrators in the event of security breach. Such form of user profiling provides a very effective way of combating insider threat that is less intrusive to individual privacy.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-59
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Minami

Since 9/11 and the creation of the U.S. Patriot Act, the intrusion of government surveillance into the lives of ordinary Americans has become a topic of great concern to many citizens. While many Americans view surveillance as a necessity in the name of national security, the government is not the only organization conducting surveillance. As technological capacity increases, an increasing number of employers are implementing technologies that allow them to maintain vigilance over the actions of their employees in the workplace. Despite many attempts to implement surveillance technologies, there is little evidence that companies are any safer now than they were ten years ago. This paper demonstrates how System Dynamics modeling can be utilized to help model the insider threat as a system. It provides analysis of the non-linear affect of decision making, assessing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order impacts of decisions, and demonstrates the important impact of delays in the system. A mathematical model is presented and simulations are conducted to determine the likely affect of company decisions and individual agent behavior.


Author(s):  
Ayla Al Shammari ◽  
Richard Rabin Maiti ◽  
Bennet Hammer

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