Welcome to USMA Athena
USMA Athena is a secure digital service managed by the United States Military Academy Library to make the work of USMA scholars freely available, while also ensuring these resources are organized to preserve the legacy of USMA scholarship. The mission of USMA Athena is to showcase the academic impact and intellectual capital that has become synonymous with the celebrated heritage of educational prowess attributed to the Long Gray Line. Scholarship submitted to USMA Athena benefits from added visibility and discoverability via Google Scholar in addition to the use of persistent URLs that will provide enduring access to the work over time.
Recent Submissions
Item Advancing an Organizational Health Perspective for Insider Threat Prevention and Management(West Point Press, 2023)Malicious insiders pose a serious risk to valued organizational assets, including proprietary information, institutional processes, personnel, finances, reputation, and firm connections. Research-based solutions for predicting, detecting, and mitigating insider threats have focused heavily on individual, organizational, and cyber risk factors (Kont et al. 2015; Greitzer et al. 2018). To that end, scholars have increasingly recognized that people’s personalities, motivations, grievances, and work stressors raise the risk of insider threat events, and the corresponding interventional strategies involve cybersecurity and work design practices to safeguard the organization against human error and deviance (Homoliak et al. 2019; Greitzer et al. 2013; Maasberg, Warren, and Beebe 2015). Yet, despite evidence that insider threat events are perpetrated by people situated within a social and organizational context, discussions of insider threat have only started to recognize the importance of socio-organizational protective factors for reducing the occurrence of insider threats (Moore, Gardner, and Rousseau 2022; Whitty 2021). We argue that a healthy organization—an organization whose people, practices, and policies effectively sustain its survival and performance—may be key to preventing and managing insider threats.Item Red Flags Reimagined: A Former CIA Operations Officer on Today’s Insider Risk Challenge(West Point Press, 2023)The last few years have been particularly challenging for insider risk professionals. Remote work creates new attack vectors and makes employee assessment harder. The ‘Great Resignation’ overburdened offboarding processes and fueled the ‘Great Exfiltration’ of intellectual property. COVID and political divisions are increasing employee stress, distraction, and disenfranchisement. Nation states and criminal groups are getting bolder at recruiting vulnerable employees to steal and ransom data. To borrow from the cybersecurity ‘CIA Triad’, the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of our people, processes, and property are at risk. As reflected in the increasing number and costs of insider events, traditional countermeasures simply aren’t up to the task. Observable indicators are diminished by remote employees being ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Unfortunately, network monitoring solutions only go so far, are complicated by remote work, are cyber and log centric, are singularly focused on network anomalies and are generally reactive. To illustrate our challenge, mentally put yourself in the chair of the insider risk analyst at a large organization; each day begins fresh with the need to somehow identify a few potential bad actors from thousands of employees. But it gets better: you also need to identify potential negligent or accidental insider risk. Further, you also need to balance employee privacy, welfare, morale, organizational culture, and possibly even a trusted workforce and zero trust strategies. The stakes are high: the consequences of a single malicious insider act can ruin your day, your year, and your organization. It’s a high-wire act. And none of these challenges are going away.Item Complexity: Leveraging Data While Being Human Centric(West Point Press, 2023)It is crucial to identify and mitigate insider risks within our organizations; however, there are two persistent challenges: 1. Leveraging ever more complex and disparate data sources for the mission. 2. Balancing this information system-driven approach with the human elements of our organization. A holistic information system that can identify insider threat risks based on known data about our people and their actions addresses the first challenge. This is crucial because the technologies that make our people more productive and effective can also be used to damage an organization at a significant cost. Like most complex operational environments, there are not enough analysts to stay on top of the myriad of emerging threats. An information system capable of supporting analysis and the decision-making process is one option that can competently scale and keep pace with evolving risks.Item Adapt or Die: Building Internal Intelligence Networks to Combat Modern Insider Threats(West Point Press, 2023)Insider threat professionals across Western governments, industry, and academia face a reckoning. As near-peer adversaries continue to target wide swathes of American innovation, industry, and government, a generation of tech-savvy millennials have joined the workforce with the ability to exfiltrate unprecedented amounts of data with a few swipes of the finger. This generation no longer solely betray a company or country for a political cause or because they were indoctrinated with foreign ideology. Oftentimes, motives are as frivolous as ego-boosting Internet upvotes, a contributing factor in the recent Teixeira leaks. Consider that for many of us; an insider threat incident could mean loss of human life, businesses destroyed, or ultimately, in the case of Western democracies, forfeiture of technological or military dominance to autocratic adversaries. These are existential-scale problems, and they require innovative solutions from bold practitioners.Item Bystander Engagement(West Point Press, 2023)The power of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Insider Threat Program resides in every individual in the DoD and their willingness to take action to help a friend, co-worker, supervisor, or family member in need. This requires us all to be aware, know whom to communicate with, understand which avenues for assistance are available, and take action.
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