An Empirical Comparison of Malicious Insiders and Benign Insiders

Abstract

Malicious insiders continue to pose a significant threat to organizations. With their knowledge, privilege, and access to organizational resources, malicious insiders can attack the organization easier than outsiders, bypassing security measures. Current research about malicious insiders’ traits is often based on a limited number of cases and lacking empirical validation. With few exceptions, most research focuses on the effects of individual traits without investigation of their interactions. To identify the effects of these traits and their interactions, this study employs text mining to analyze 133 real-world malicious insider cases by comparing how the media portray malicious insiders to how the media portray benign insiders. This study sheds light on the predictive power of common traits of malicious insiders. Also, the interaction effects of some traits indicate that although they are not significant at the unary level, their co-occurrence differentiates malicious insiders with benign insiders as portrayed in the media.