Insider Threat: Australian lawyer charged with misconduct

Insider threat is the misuse by a trusted person of privileged access to assets and operations.  The trusted person’s actions may be unintentional or they may be intentional.  In either instance the harm caused can be the same.Organisations make a choice to grant trust to a person when they decide to employ them.  But the pre-employment screening process is really a point-in-time security check which would reject candidates with any obvious security risk attributes.  However, real risk occurs once a person is employed, is inside the organisation, and is often trusted by default. If an organisation does not have appropriate measures in place to observe and evaluate employees then they maximise the risk of insider threat activity.This risk is often exacerbated where organisations rely heavily on initial screening and trust-based models, without implementing mechanisms for continuous monitoring of behaviour and access.   In such environments, abnormal activity may go undetected because there is no established baseline against which to assess deviations.In this podcast Pentagram Advisory explores the insider threat case of a lawyer employed by the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions.