Characteristics of malicious insiders and their relationships with different types of malicious attacks

Abstract

Malicious insiders continue to pose a great threat to organizations. With their knowledge and access to organizational resources, malicious insiders could launch attacks more easily that result in more damaging impacts compared to outsiders. However, empirical research about malicious insiders is rare due to the unavailability of data. With few exceptions, many studies focus on a small number of cases. In order to identify common characteristics of a large number of malicious insiders, these studies employ text mining to analyze 133 real-world cases of offenders from military units, intelligence agencies, and business organizations with data available to public. I first compare malicious insiders sample with the general public then to the sample of benign insiders. The results show that the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and disgruntlement among malicious insider are higher than the general public and the sample of benign insiders. Also, the prevalence of interactions of disgruntlement and personality disorders among malicious insiders are higher than the benign insiders. The final study found that the emotional characteristics of malicious insiders are more associated with expressive attacks, on the other side, cognitive characteristics are more associated with instrumental attacks. Contributions of this study reside in two aspects: first, I utilize public data from documented malicious insider cases, implying a potentially valuable data source for future studies in this domain; second, I validate malicious insider characteristics identified in previous research, thereby establishing a foundation for more comprehensive research in the future.