Conversations around organizational risk and insider threat

Abstract

Organizational risk and resilience as well as insider threat have been studied through the lenses of socio-psychological studies and information and computer sciences. As with all disciplines, it is an area in which practitioners, enthusiasts, and experts discuss the theory, issues, and solutions of the field in various online public forums. Such conversations, despite their public nature, can be difficult to understand and to study, even by those deeply involved in the communities themselves. Who are the key actors? How can we understand and characterize the culture around such communities, the problems they face, and the solutions favored by the experts in the field? Which narratives are being created and propagated, and by whom - and are these actors truly people, or are they autonomous agents, or "bots"? In this paper, we demonstrate the value in applying dynamic network analysis and social network analysis to gain situational awareness of the public conversation around insider threat, nation-state espionage, and industrial espionage. Characterizing public discourse around a topic can reveal individuals and organizations attempting to push or shape narratives in ways that might not be obvious to casual observation. Such techniques have been used to great effect in the study of elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the study of misinformation and disinformation, and we hope to show that their use in this area is a powerful way to build a foundation of understanding around the conversations in the online public forum, provide data and analysis for use in further research, and equip counter insider threat practitioners with new insights.