Insider Risk Theory
Conceptual models and behavioral insights that explain how insider risk evolves, including motivation, drift, and risk escalation patterns.
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James Weston
Insider Risk Theory
Perimeter to Population: A New Vocabulary for Insider Threat
In 1969, the United States Department of Defense launched ARPANET, one of the earliest packet-switched networks, linking research institutions and government agencies to share scarce computing resources. ARPANET became the proving ground for many of the technical principles that underpin today’s Internet.The intellectual foundations of this network trace back to Paul Baran’s work at RAND in 1962, where he proposed distributed, packet-based communications as a means of ensuring nuclear command-and-control could survive a Soviet attack. While ARPANET itself was not designed for nuclear operations, its architecture reflected Baran’s principles of resilience, redundancy, and survivability under attack – concepts rooted in...
James Weston
Insider Risk Theory
Behavioral Drift as a Predictive Signal for Insider Threat Escalation
In the practice of insider risk management, there is often a tendency to focus exclusively on acute acts of harm; data exfiltration, sabotage, and unauthorized disclosure. But these outcomes are seldom sudden. More often, they represent the final step in a longer behavioral trajectory that begins with relatively minor, individually tolerable infringements.At Forscie, we refer to this phenomenon as Behavioral Drift: the progressive departure from expected conduct within a trusted environment. It typically begins not with malicious intent, but with subtle, low-level violations of an organization's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP); an unapproved tool installed, a file moved to personal storage,...