In order to make the government employees, affiliated contractors and the general public, the office of the top U.S. counterintelligence official has launched an alert campaign to make them familiarized with the serious risk they may came to be exposed to resulting in security breaches or violent incidents by the “insiders”.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center is a branch of the Office of Director of National Intelligence and it declared the September as “National Insider Threat Awareness Month” in collaboration with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The move came as an effort to educate government as well as private sectors to identify the threats related to the violent behavior and potential data security breaches and to report those potential risks to appropriate authorities.
Due to risk of involvement of employees in making intentional or unintentional use of their authorized access to personnel, information and facilities to harm an organization, not a single organizations is deemed safe from exposure to insider threats, said William Evanina, who is a former CIA and FBI official and is currently heading the counterintelligence center.
The harm can range from malicious activities like unauthorized disclosure of classified information, theft, espionage and sabotage, to negligence such as clicking on a spear-phishing link or failing to secure data or it could reach even to an act of violence, Evanina said.
If not most or all of them, but many of the individuals thinking over or engaged in even threats to organizations that range from disclosing sensitive formation or leaking data to violent acts indicates, as Evanina described it, concerning behavior before practically get engaged in negative incidents, said Evanina and another U.S. security official.
And such behaviors could also comprise of unexpected wealth, attempts to suicide or even excessive use of alcohol, the second security official said.
