Can managers learn how to spot an insider threat before it becomes real?
A profiling unit of the FBI has started a project to determine whether technology can play a role in identifying employees who are ripe to cause trouble, according to a report in NextGov.
“Is there a similarity between the person who is putting a logic bomb on your network and the person who is going to throw a bomb in your office?” said Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Burton of the FBI Cyber Behavioral Analysis Center, quoted in the article. “Are the behaviors different? Do they intersect?”
Insider threats are especially insidious because they are carried out by employees who have gained some level of trust and, sometimes, legitimate access to sensitive or classified information. That level of access, however, is not necessary to cause havoc. In the UK, an immigration officer put his wife on a terrorist watch list so that she could not fly home from Pakistan. He was fired in 2011, after having kept his wife out of Britain for three years, according to the Mail Online.
