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6 Types of Insiders that Could Be Working for You

  • 6 Types of Insiders that Could Be Working for You-

    The Disgruntled Departing Employee (Saboteur)

    This employee can be introverted and extremely detail-oriented. She may feel underappreciated and overlooked by management, causing her to become frustrated and careless about her work. You might notice her openly searching for a new job during work hours. As a result, she may have a huge fight with her boss and quit, leaving a "time bomb" program that will go off months after her departure, wiping important records and replacing them with important transactions.

    Indicators: Seeks access to servers outside normal business hours. Analysis of communications often reveals dissatisfaction with rules. Minor rules violations may be indicative of greater problems.

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6 Types of Insiders that Could Be Working for You

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  • 6 Types of Insiders that Could Be Working for You-2

    The Disgruntled Departing Employee (Saboteur)

    This employee can be introverted and extremely detail-oriented. She may feel underappreciated and overlooked by management, causing her to become frustrated and careless about her work. You might notice her openly searching for a new job during work hours. As a result, she may have a huge fight with her boss and quit, leaving a "time bomb" program that will go off months after her departure, wiping important records and replacing them with important transactions.

    Indicators: Seeks access to servers outside normal business hours. Analysis of communications often reveals dissatisfaction with rules. Minor rules violations may be indicative of greater problems.

Insider threats are the underappreciated threat. They fly under the radar as stories about hackers get top billing. Insider attacks are more insidious because they betray the trust the company has in its employees, partners and systems. Insider threats are the hardest to detect and take longer to discover than any other threats, according to the most recent Verizon Data Breach Report. Insider threats range across types and include: intentional data theft as in the Morgan Stanley breach; possible insider trading, like that recently seen in the LinkedIn acquisition; garden variety employee mistakes, such as the Google insider data breach; and ex-employees accused of taking trade secrets, as alleged in an IBM lawsuit. And then there are the active efforts by criminals to recruit insiders on the Dark Web or nation-state espionage that takes the form of phishing emails or bribed insiders.

The insider threat is not really a cybersecurity problem or a data analytics issue; it's a human risk problem that can only be solved by understanding how people think and behave. In this slideshow, RedOwl has applied the science of risk assessment to employee behavior and come up with six persona types of employees who represent insider threat risks.