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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 Malicious Insider (Intellectual Property Thief)

    Focused on climbing the corporate ladder, this leader has little time for those beneath his position, yet typically feels undervalued. These types of people are often calculated when they resign, planning to go to a key competitor and taking valuable intellectual property with them. Unfortunately, these employees are often senior team members with a high level of access to sensitive information like client files, studies, strategies, and business plans.

    Indicators: Unusual number of inbound emails from external contacts, frequent communications outside normal channels, spikes of documents to an external email.

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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-3

    The Malicious Insider (Intellectual Property Thief)

    Focused on climbing the corporate ladder, this leader has little time for those beneath his position, yet typically feels undervalued. These types of people are often calculated when they resign, planning to go to a key competitor and taking valuable intellectual property with them. Unfortunately, these employees are often senior team members with a high level of access to sensitive information like client files, studies, strategies, and business plans.

    Indicators: Unusual number of inbound emails from external contacts, frequent communications outside normal channels, spikes of documents to an external email.

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.