Using AI/ML Analytics and 360° Profiling to address today’s emerging threats
By Dave Boswell
Director, Cyber & Engineering
and Joseph Bradley
Director, Law Enforcement Programs
To be effective in today’s ever-evolving landscape, insider threat solutions must be able to catch and resolve threats faster, adapt to changing scenarios, and quickly scale. ECS experts discuss how pairing artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions with new approaches to insider threat analysis can help organizations better understand their workforce and mitigate insider threats.
The Keys To Effective Insider Threat Mitigation
AI/ML
Process and analyze
vast amounts of
employee data
+
360° Profile
Gain in-depth insight into
employee behavior beyond
traditional analysis
=
A Proactive Insider Threat Solution
Intervene with individuals
before they become
insider threats
Process, Analyze, and Scale with AI/ML
From deliberate espionage to accidental data leaks, insider threats can cause irreparable damage to an organization. But traditional insider threat solutions are generally reactive rather than proactive. By the time an insider threat is discovered, the damage has already been done.
Risk management solutions tend to focus on user activity monitoring (UAM), user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), and data loss prevention (DLP). While these approaches allow us to understand what has happened and how, they typically fall short of creating predictive analysis. AI/ML solutions enable us to process and analyze vast amounts of data points, making them useful at identifying anomalies and patterns and enabling organizations to discover early indicators of malicious actions. To maximize the analytic power of AI/ML within the context of insider threat, organizations also need a deep understanding of employee motivations. That insight begins with 360° profiling.
Stop Threats Before They Occur with 360° Profiling
Gathering a baseline of positive and negative behaviors is part of what we call the 360° profile—a holistic view of people that helps create a deeper understanding of employee motivations. By combining 360° profiling with the advanced analytical abilities of AI/ML, organizations can build risk profiles and implement countermeasure campaigns to deter potential attacks before they happen.
What makes an employee tick? What makes someone walk into work and become a threat? Current insider threat analysis tends to focus only on negative behaviors individuals exhibit. But individuals’ behaviors are influenced by both positive and negative emotions, as well as environments, meaning even balanced individuals can present a threat under the right circumstances. By understanding both the positive and negative behaviors of team members, organizations can shorten insider threat investigation time, reduce false positives, and focus on higher priority threats.
Let’s say an organization has insight into an employee’s positive drivers and motivations. The organization can take proactive actions to improve that person’s mood, making the employee more productive and less likely to be negatively impacted by an action, event, or situation in the workplace. As a result, the overall risk of that person becoming a malicious threat is minimized, reducing the organization’s threat level.
Learn how your organization can mitigate threats to its assets, resources, and information.
Transform Your Insider Threat Platform
Organizations seeking to improve the effectiveness of their insider threat programs can do so without a large financial investment in tools and technology; instead, they should re-envision an AI/ML-driven analytical approach that incorporates a 360° view of people’s positive and negative behaviors.
At ECS, we work with organizations across the commercial and federal enterprise to develop analytical models that enable analysts to understand the state of their workforce, examine the conditions surrounding actual threats, and proactively intervene with an individual before they become an insider threat.
