Practical management of malicious insider threat – An enterprise CSIRT perspective

Abstract

Communication and Information Systems (CIS) now form the primary information store, exchange and data analysis for all modern military and are crucial to command and control. The ubiquitousness of CIS within the military not only means that there is a complete reliance on CIS, but also presents new avenues of attack by malicious insiders. Military sources say that the insider threat is their number one security concern. This paper presents a case study of the technical counter measures and processes used to deter, detect and mitigate malicious insider threats that the author has researched, using non-classified anonymous interview and the analysis of anonymised qualitative field data, within a specific military organisation. It is not the intention of the author that this paper be viewed as an analysis of the “current state of play” of threats and countermeasures that generically exist across all military and defence organisations – rather it presents the technological and organisational processes utilised and challenges encountered at one organisation. A short discussion of the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) structure adopted to successfully manage insider and other CIS security threats is presented, followed by a more detailed overview of existing and emerging technical efforts to deter, detect and mitigate such malicious insider threats within the military environment under study. Emphasis will be on the emerging technologies such as anomaly detection using real-time e-discovery, enterprise forensics and profiling users “cyber” behaviour and how these integrate into CSIRT technologies and processes. The technical advantages and challenges that such technologies present within a military alliance will be discussed. The success of such technologies in combating current malicious insider threat environment will be briefly compared with those put forward as challenges in the “Research on mitigating the insider threat to information systems #2” workgroup which took place in 2000 (Anderson et al., 2000.). In closing the author introduce the concept of Stateful Object Use Consequence Analysis as a way of managing the insider threat.