Anomaly Detection for Insider Threats Using Unsupervised Ensembles

Abstract

Insider threat represents a major cybersecurity challenge to companies, organizations, and government agencies. Insider threat detection involves many challenges, including unbalanced data, limited ground truth, and possible user behavior changes. This research presents an unsupervised learning based anomaly detection approach for insider threat detection. We employ four unsupervised learning methods with different working principles, and explore various representations of data with temporal information. Furthermore, different computational intelligence schemes are explored to combine these models to create anomaly detection ensembles for improving the detection performance. Evaluation results show that the approach allows learning from unlabelled data under challenging conditions for insider threat detection. Insider threats are detected with high detection and low false positive rates. For example, 60% of malicious insiders are detected under 0.1% investigation budget, and all malicious insiders are detected at less than 5% investigation budget. Furthermore, we explore the ability of the proposed approach to generalize for detecting new anomalous behaviors in different datasets, i.e., robustness. Finally, results demonstrate that a voting-based ensemble of anomaly detection can be used to improve detection performance as well as the robustness. Comparisons with the state-of-the-art confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.