The New Insider Threat: How Commercially Available Data can be used to Target and Persuade
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Authors
Fox, Jaclyn
Issue Date
2024
Type
Article
Language
en
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
This paper examines how commercially available information can be weaponized by malicious actors to identify, target, and manipulate individuals with insider access to sensitive information. Drawing on empirical research about insider threat correlates, our study offers analysis of a dataset from Microsoft’s Xandr advertising platform containing over 650,000 audience segments from 93 data brokers. The findings demonstrate that the same variables organizations use to detect potential insider threats—such as psychological predispositions, life stressors, ideological positions, and motivations—can also be reverse-engineered by malicious actors from commercial data to target vulnerable members of the United States military and government. This research underscores the risks posed by the unregulated data brokerage ecosystem which commodifies personal information, and its national security implications.
Description
Citation
Fox, Jaclyn. 2024. “The New Insider Threat: How Commercially Available Data Can Be Used to Target and Persuade.” The Managing Insider Risk & Organizational Resilience (MIROR) Journal 2 (1): 61–86. https://insiderthreat.westpoint.edu/the-new-insider-threat-how-commercially-available-data-can-be-used-to-target-and-persuade/.
Publisher
Managing Insider Risk and Organizational Resilience (MIROR) Journal