Cyber Insider Threat: Trustworthiness in Virtual Organizations

This study examines human trustworthiness as a key component in countering insider threats. The term insider threat refers to situations where a critical member of an organization behaves against the interests of the organization, in an illegal and/or unethical manner. This study adopts the attribution of human-observed changes in behavior as analogous to a group of "sensors" on a computer network. Using online team-based games, this study re-creates realistic insider threat situations in which human sensors have the opportunity to observe changes in the behavior of a focal individual. The intellectual merit of this sociotechnical study lies in its capability to tackle complex insider threat problems by adopting a social psychological theory on predicting human trustworthiness in a virtual collaborative environment. The study contributes to a theoretical framework of trustworthiness attribution in geographically dispersed virtual organizations. The broader impact of this study may lead to the development of sociotechnical systems: an intelligence-based sensor system that analyzes trustworthiness based on human virtual interactions, in an attempt to predict malfeasance.

Autorentext

Shuyuan is Assistant Professor at Florida State University iSchool (since 2012), Assistant Professor at Drexel (2010-2012), and InfoSec professional (since 1996). She has PhD in Information Science and Technology from Syracuse University (2009), Master of Philosophy in Information Transfer (2007), M.B.A. (1996), B.S. in Computer Science (1991).