Enemies Within: Redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy

Wall, D.S.

doi:10.1057/sj.2012.1

Enemies Within: Redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy

Wall, D.S.

Authors

D.S. Wall

Abstract

The critical importance of electronic information exchanges in the daily operation of most large modern organizations is causing them to broaden their security provision to include the custodians of exchanged data – the insiders. The prevailing data loss threat model mainly focuses upon the criminal outsider and mainly regards the insider threat as ‘outsiders by proxy’, thus shaping the relationship between the worker and workplace in information security policy. A policy that increasingly takes the form of social policy for the information age as it acquires the power to include and exclude sections of society and potentially to re-stratify it? This article draws upon empirical sources to critically explore the insider threat in organizations. It looks at the prevailing threat model before deconstructing ‘the insider’ into various risk profiles, including the well-meaning insider, before drawing conclusions about what the building blocks of information security policy around the insider might be.

Citation

Wall, D. (2013). Enemies Within: Redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy. Security Journal, 26(2), 107-124. https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2012.1

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Apr 1, 2013
Deposit Date	Mar 5, 2012
Publicly Available Date	Nov 19, 2014
Journal	Security Journal
Print ISSN	0955-1662
Electronic ISSN	1743-4645
Publisher	Palgrave Macmillan
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	26
Issue	2
Pages	107-124
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2012.1
Keywords	Information security, Security policy, Cybercrime, Organizations, Insider threat.

Files

Accepted Journal Article (748 Kb)
PDF

Copyright Statement
This is a post-peer-review pre-copyedit version of an article published in Security Journal. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Wall, D.S. (2013) 'Enemies within : redefining the insider threat in organizational security policy.', Security journal., 26 (2). pp. 107-124 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/sj.2012.1.