Fraud Management & Cybercrime , Governance & Risk Management , Insider Threat

How to Identify Insider Threats

Organizations in all sectors need to develop an "early warning system" to detect insider threats, says Scott Weber, managing director at the risk management firm Stroz Friedberg.

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In a video interview at Information Security Media Group's 2015 Data Breach Prevention & Response Summit New York, Weber delineates how organizations can determine potential insider threat risks by monitoring communications and the ways in which insiders interact with data.

"The goal is to have an early warning system, so you move from mitigation, which is, 'Something has already happened, and we now need to contain it,' to prevention, identifying at-risk individuals before they act and providing whatever assistance you need to cool them down so they don't wind up acting in a way that harms themselves or their co-workers," Weber says.

In this interview, Weber also discusses:

• Examples of behavioral "red flags," using 60 kinds of psychological measurements;
• The use of automation to identify outliers within an organization who may be potential threats; and
• The importance of combining tools and knowledge from stakeholders throughout an organization in creating an effective insider data protection policy.

Weber is managing director at Stroz Friedberg, which specializes in cybersecurity, investigations, intelligence and risk management. He is primarily responsible for overseeing the firm's technology and advisory services involving the application of advanced psycholinguistic algorithms to big data.