Insider Threat: Enhancing BPM through Social Media

Abstract

Modern business environments have a constant need to increase their productivity, reduce costs and offer competitive products and services. This can be achieved via modeling their business processes. Yet, even in light of modelling's widespread success, one can argue that it lacks built-in security mechanisms able to detect and fight threats that may manifest throughout the process. Academic research has proposed a variety of different solutions which focus on different kinds of threat. In this paper we focus on insider threat, i.e. insiders participating in an organization's business process, who, depending on their motives, may cause severe harm to the organization. We examine existing security approaches to tackle down the aforementioned threat in enterprise business processes. We discuss their pros and cons and propose a monitoring approach that aims at mitigating the insider threat. This approach enhances business process monitoring tools with information evaluated from Social Media. It exams the online behavior of users and pinpoints potential insiders with critical roles in the organization's processes. We conclude with some observations on the monitoring results (i.e. psychometric evaluations from the social media analysis) concerning privacy violations and argue that deployment of such systems should be only allowed on exceptional cases, such as protecting critical infrastructures.