Insider Activity Research Articles

OPIN-ITP: Optimized Physics Informed Network with Trimmed Score Regression Based Insider Threats Prediction in Cloud Computing

INTRODUCTION: Insider threats are a major issue for cyber security. In contrast to external attackers, insiders have more privileges and authorized access to data and resources, which can cause an organization great harm. To completely understand an insider's activities throughout the organization, a more sophisticated method is needed. OBJECTIVES: Based on an organization's login activity, this study proposes a novel conceptual method for insider threat detection. Behavioural activities such as HTTP, Email and Login details are collected to create a dataset which is further processed for pre-processing using data transformation and Trimmed Score Regression (TSR). METHODS: These pre-data are given to the feature extraction process using Deep Feature Synthesis (DFS) extraction. The extracted data are fed to Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINN) for insider threat detection. RESULTS: The prediction process of PINN was improved through optimally choosing parameters such as learning rate and weight using Hunter-prey Optimization (HPO). The proposed model offers 68% detection rate, 98.4% accuracy, 5% FDR, 95% F1_score and 0.7005 sec execution time. CONCLUSION: Observed outcomes are compared to other traditional approaches of validation. The contrast with traditional approaches shows that the proposed model provides better outcomes than in traditional models and is therefore a good fit for real-time threat prediction.

Towards a transformative vision for gender and Canadian international policy: The role and impact of ‘feminist inside activists’

In this paper, we consider the role of “feminist inside activists” in shaping the Canadian international policy landscape and provide examples of how government employees have actively promoted feminist and gender equality priorities. Specifically, this paper advances our understanding of how policy translates into action, and the transformative potential of agents of change in gender equality and feminist policy-making within Canada’s international policy machinery. Building on studies that identify the significant contributions of mid-level government employees who fight to keep gender equality a priority in government programming, we explore these contributions in the context of inside activism, documenting the significance of the work of both senior and mid-level government officials in advancing feminist policies and priorities. As an agency-focused analysis, this study complements and builds on critical feminist analyses of structural and systemic inequality.

The Effect of Insider versus Outsider Activism on Corporate Targets’ Market Performance

Although outsider activists are the main participants of social protests, the large scale protests initiated by insider activists in recent years have attracted the public eyes and induced us to wonder whether insider activists, with higher risk and more significant cost to initiate and participate in social protests, are able to achieve more social movement outcomes than outsider activists. While factors influencing social movement outcomes have received ample attention from the perspectives of structure and agency, we still lack a good understanding of the impact of activist identity on social movement outcomes. This research builds a theoretical model to explain the links between activist identity and social movement economic outcomes by employing and extending the political process mode, a particular theory to explain social movement emergence and outcomes. Hypotheses developed from the model predict that protests initiated by insiders are more destructive to corporate targets’ market performance than outsider protests and that the destructiveness advantage of insider protests would be alleviated if corporate targets enjoy higher status but strengthened if targeted firms focus on service business. Results from a sample of social protests targeting U.S. public corporations reported by the New York Times between 2001 and 2021 provide support for the predictions. This research contributes to social movement outcomes by exploring the diverse impact of different types of activists and examining and extending the mobilizing structures of the political process model. This research also extends literature about insider activism by studying the economic outcomes of insider external activism.

From Sheltered to Included: The Emancipation of Disabled Workers from Benevolent Marginalization

While there have been several studies on overt forms of marginalization, few have examined benevolent marginalization, where people may unquestioningly participate in their own paternalistic subjugation by following a prescribed identity. How might such individuals end up achieving emancipation from an infantilizing identity? To address this puzzle, we conducted a longitudinal study of a German sheltered workshop, an organization providing employment for disabled people. We observed that workers with disability initially maintained a regulating organizational identity based on paternalistic segregation. However, over time, they constructed their own self-determining identity and coproduced a change in the workshop’s identity from “shelter” to “inclusion.” First, we show that in order to coconstruct their preferred self-concept, benevolently marginalized individuals need to gain the support of those in power, who change their role from a guardian to an ally. Second, while achieving liberation from overt marginalization is likely to involve confrontation with one’s oppressors, we suggest that achieving emancipation from benevolent marginalization is a collaborative process of mutual consciousness raising and sensitization. Third, while changes of identity may occur after exposure to alternative discourses, often involving the contentious performances of external activists, we show how insider activists mobilize collective action for change within a protectionist organization.

‘Doing good and feeling good’: how narratives in development stymie gender equality in organisations

This paper examines the challenges of working on gender equality in international development research projects and institutes, and how a code of appropriate emotions and behaviours is used to silence and stifle institutional change. Using my own experience at a science research institute, I argue that while senior leaders have acknowledged the importance of equity and diversity, internal institutional dynamics, workplace culture and hierarchies make change difficult. Furthermore, due to the nature of international development work, there is an affective norm (‘doing good and feeling good’) that surrounds the notion of working in ‘developing’ countries. This affect is gendered because a masculine camaraderie is generated. However, the affect shuts out self-reflexivity, because it would disrupt the narrative of selflessness and heroism of aid. The inside activists within the institute navigate between challenging the norms and having an unspoken code of civility imposed upon them, which is used to police and discipline how inside activists should behave. When inside activists criticise discriminatory practices and values, they are dismissed as being ‘angry’ and ‘uncivil’. The result is the depoliticisation of gender and feminist theories and practice, where people go through the motions of equity and mainstreaming without achieving meaningful change.

Insider Activists and Secondhand Smoke Countermeasures in Japan

Long considered a smoker’s paradise, Japan passed its strictest regulations yet on indoor smoking in 2018 with revisions to the Health Promotion Law and a new ordinance in Tokyo. Timed for the Tokyo Olympics, both reforms made smoking regulations stronger and more legalistic despite reflecting distinctive policy paradigms in their particulars. The national regulations curtailed smoking in many public spaces but accommodated smoking in small restaurants and bars. Tokyo’s stronger restrictions emphasized public health protection by exempting only eateries with no employees. I argue that fully understanding these contemporaneous reforms requires analyzing insider activists: state actors who participated in the tobacco control movement or had sustained interaction with it during earlier reform waves. Case studies drawing on interviews and movement and government documents illustrate the mechanisms insider activists can access because they straddle multiple fields. This article contributes to scholarship about ideas, policy entrepreneurship, and the blurry line between insiders and outsiders in policymaking.

Escaping the Ellipsis of Diversity: Insider Activists’ Use of Implementation Resources to Influence Organization Policy

Researchers have explored in depth how social movement actors strive to pass laws to change organizations exogenously or to demand that they make commitments or policy changes. But ensuring that organizations implement such commitments or policies is challenging. Insider activists may be influential for implementation processes, and I explore how they can increase that influence. I contend that insider activists influence such processes by offering their organizations implementation resources, such as free and ready-to-use content and model programs that reflect changes the activists want to see. To develop this argument, I explore how, starting in the mid-2000s, LGBT activists developed resources to ensure that diversity policies were increasingly relevant for sexual minorities in France. Many diversity policies at the time expressed commitment to “gender, disability, age . . .” Activists contended that nothing was done for the minorities who were not named—those left in the ellipsis (. . .) of diversity. Using web archives and interviews, I show that LGBT rights activists increased their influence on French organizations by developing implementation resources that corporations could readily use to flesh out their diversity commitments and implement diversity programs to promote the inclusion of LGBT employees. I demonstrate how insider activists used these implementation resources to denounce organizations’ superficial commitments or employees’ homophobic practices, thereby compelling organizations to change.

Movement Institutions: The Bureaucratic Sources of Feminist Protest

AbstractOver the past several decades, scholarship on women's movements, feminism, and the state has brought renewed attention to the study of protest politics by questioning its frontier with dominant institutions. This article takes this critique a step further by considering the institutional dimension of the state-movement intersection. Drawing on the French case, we argue that institutions that are formally devoted to women's rights inside the state (women's policy agencies) can operate asmovement institutions—that is, as bureaucratic instances routinely engrained with a protest dimension—rather than being only a shelter for a network of insider activists. As such, they can provide a specific, institutional feminist socialization to their members; they can purvey, rather than only relay, feminist protest, and they can deploy institutional repertoires of protest, combining bureaucratic and movement dimensions. We conclude that the definition and boundaries of the women's movement need to be broadened to include bureaucratic sources of feminist protest.

Abortion as empowerment: reproductive rights activism in a legally restricted context

BackgroundThis paper analyzes the strategies used by activist health professionals in Argentina who justify providing abortion despite legal restrictions on the procedure. These “insider activists” make a case for abortion rights by linking pregnancy termination to a woman’s ability to exert agency at a key point in her reproductive life, and argue that refusing women access to the procedure constitutes a grievous health risk. This argument frames pregnancy termination as an issue of empowerment and also as a medical necessity.MethodsThis article is based on ethnographic research conducted in Argentina in 2013 and 2015, which includes in-depth interviews with abortion activists and health professionals and ethnographic observation at activist events and in clinics.ResultsDuring the period of my field research, the medical staff in one clinic shifted from abortion counseling, based on a harm reduction model, to legal pregnancy termination, a new mode of abortion provision where they directly provided abortions based on the legal health exception. These insider activists formalized the latter approach by creating a diagnostic instrument that frames women’s “bio-psycho-social” reasons for wishing to terminate a pregnancy as medically justified.ConclusionsThe clinical practice analyzed in this article raises important questions about the potential for health professionals to take on an activist role by making safe abortion accessible, even in a context where the procedure is highly restricted.

Insider activists: The fraught possibilities of LGBT activisms from within

Legislative shifts in the first decade of the 21st Century altered the rights and protections for lesbians, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people in England in disparate and uneven ways that have yet to be fully investigated. This paper explores the possibilities and pitfalls for LGBT insider activists- LGBT people who undertake LGBT activism and work with/for state institutions (such as local government). Using interviews and other community engagements that were part of the Count Me In Too research, this paper explores the political activisms of public sector workers in ‘gay Brighton’. We find them placed at the interface of LGBT community based-activism and state sponsored work. This was productive for some, but also created a messy, and at times painful, between-ness for those on the front line. Rather than solely addressing these activists as assimilationist (which they sometimes are), conformist (which they undoubtedly are) or simple ‘selling out’, we critically consider activisms from within institutions that support LGBT equalities agendas and the importance of space in creating these activisms.

Classifying different denial‐of‐service attacks in cloud computing using rule‐based learning

ABSTRACTFrom traditional networking to cloud computing, one of the essential but formidable tasks is to detect cyber attacks and their types. A cloud provider's unwillingness to share security‐related data with its clients adds to the difficulty of detection by a cloud customer. The research contributions in this paper are twofold. First, an investigative survey on cloud computing is conducted with the main focus on gaps that is hindering cloud adoption, accompanied by a review of the threat remediation challenges. Second, some thoughts are constructed on novel approaches to address some of the widely discussed denial‐of‐service (DoS) attack types by using machine learning techniques. We evaluate the techniques' performances by using statistical ranking‐based methods, and find the rule‐based learning technique C4.5, from a set of popular learning algorithms, as an efficient tool to classify various DoS attacks in the cloud platform. The novelty of our rather rigorous analysis is in its ability to identify insider's activities and other DoS attacks by using performance data. The reason for using performance data rather than traditional logs and security‐related data is that the performance data can be collected by the customers themselves without any help from cloud providers. To the best of our knowledge, no one has made such attempts before. Our findings and thoughts captured through a series of experiments in our constructed cloud server are expected to give researchers, cloud providers and customers additional insight and tools to proactively protect themselves from known or perhaps even unknown security issues that have similar patterns. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Response to Liesl Haas' review of The Women's Movement Inside and Outside the State

First, I want to thank Liesl Haas for her thoughtful and generous review of The Women's MovementInside and Outside the State. She raises two set of questions which I would like to address here. First, she asks whether a better sample of insider activists would have been found by choosing key pieces of policy and identifying the major players as she does in her own book. While every sampling strategy represents a trade-off when no clear sampling frame exists, such a method seems to me fraught with a number of dangers, including a selection bias towards visible and successful cases (which might lead us to examine only insider feminist successes and exclude those who were influential but less visible) and predefinition by the investigator of what constitutes a feminist policy. I believe one of the strengths of my study was the finding that insider feminists influenced policies ordinarily not identified as feminist—such as foreign aid legislation or scientific research in the NIH. Haas argues a change in sampling method might have increased the number of younger feminists (who were underrepresented in the sample) but their underrepresentation results largely from a focus on activists in higher positions in the bureaucracy, the tendency of fewer feminists to enter the bureaucracy under post-Reagan republican administrations, and my conscious decision to focus on the period before 2001 when interviewing so that I did not ask questions about the current administration.

Who Greens the Northern Light? Green inside Activists in Local Environmental Governing in Sweden

With this paper we aim to further our understanding of local environmental governing by analysing green inside activists who use expert-based authority, networks, and a professional position within public administration to green government policy and action from the inside. Using new survey data, we identify and analyse who these actors are and whether they matter for local environmental governing in Sweden. The results show that green inside activists operate within 23% of the Swedish municipalities and that these municipalities score higher on three different measurements of environmental governing performance, which supports the conclusion that green inside activists do make a difference. We also show that green inside activists differ from other public officials working with environmental issues in that they are more frequently involved in policy making, have more extensive horizontal and vertical networks, and promote societal changes to a greater degree. We end by raising key questions concerning the democratic legitimacy of these actors.

The Power of the Inside Activist: Understanding Policy Change by Empowering the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF)

This article contributes to an understanding of policy change. Exploring a local land planning case, it investigates how an environmental advocacy coalition effectively challenged road and housing plans, with the result that an area was instead developed into a nature reserve. In the course of the article, the value and practical effectiveness of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is examined and developed with the help of two central concepts—the “value network” and “inside activist”. The outcome of the case is explained by the powerful influence of a value network of ornithologists, with particular inside activists of that network playing important roles in presenting a challenge to development of the area. Instead of trying to build an abstract theory of the ACF, the article argues the need to develop the ACF as a framework, opening it up to insights from policy network and social constructionist research as well as from practical processes.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Social Movements in Organizations

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Social Movements in Organizations