Insider Threats and DoD Response

 

Insider threats are a danger to every organization. While all threat actors have motives, insiders enjoy ideal means and opportunity. From the inside, they are in a much better position to carry out damaging activities. Organizations are a one-stop-shop for hackers, whether they’re criminals, hacktivists or foreign spies. Every day, we see advanced cyber operations from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea targeting the U.S. Many of these efforts are focused on economic espionage. More than ever before, adversaries are stealing America’s information, innovation, technology, and research and development. The civilian sector is the new battleground. It’s asymmetric warfare where nation-states are targeting companies in nearly every U.S. sector, costing our nation jobs and an estimated $300 to $500 billion per year. Ninety percent of the Justice Department’s economic espionage cases from 2011-2018 involved China. How many of you hire Foreign graduates, graduate students, or researchers from prestigious U.S. Institutions to fulfill your engineering or executive ranks? Did you consider that they may be working for China, Russia, North Korea, etc.? How about your outside third party vendor — who do they employ? These are new things that you now have to consider when interviewing and hiring. It has become such a problem for the department of defense (DoD), that they had to create a counter-insider threat program.  The program aims to teach analysts in the various DOD component hubs to recognize concerning behaviors and potential threats before any criminal or hostile action from the inside can occur.