Techniques and countermeasures for preventing insider threats

Abstract

With the wide use of technologies nowadays, various security issues have emerged. Public and private sectors are both spending a large portion of their budget to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data from possible attacks. Among these attacks are insider attacks which are more serious than external attacks, as insiders are authorized users who have legitimate access to sensitive assets of an organization. As a result, several studies exist in the literature aimed to develop techniques and tools to detect and prevent various types of insider threats. This article reviews different techniques and countermeasures that are proposed to prevent insider attacks. A unified classification model is proposed to classify the insider threat prevention approaches into two categories (biometric-based and asset-based metric). The biometric-based category is also classified into (physiological, behavioral and physical), while the asset metric-based category is also classified into (host, network and combined). This classification systematizes the reviewed approaches that are validated with empirical results utilizing the grounded theory method for rigorous literature review. Additionally, the article compares and discusses significant theoretical and empirical factors that play a key role in the effectiveness of insider threat prevention approaches (e.g., datasets, feature domains, classification algorithms, evaluation metrics, real-world simulation, stability and scalability, etc.). Major challenges are also highlighted which need to be considered when deploying real-world insider threat prevention systems. Some research gaps and recommendations are also presented for future research directions.