A recently released white paper from the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) examines potential biases associated with insider threat programs to help organizations improve their identification and mitigation of insider threats. The report, Strategies for Addressing Bias in Insider Threat Programs, stresses that bias undermines the effectiveness of insider threat programs by focusing on low-risk threats and ignoring higher risks. This leads to wasted resources, among other impacts.

The paper identifies two categories of potential biases, cognitive biases associated with people and technological biases. Personal cognitive biases, whether implicit or overt, such as confirmation bias, can degrade the objective assessments of an insider threat program. Technological biases are associated with data selection, creation, and categorization as well as computer monitoring programs. The paper provides several recommendations for organizations to overcome biases in their insider threat program. The recommendations are broken down into three categories: identify source bias, mitigate data bias, and mitigate model bias. Read more at Homeland Security Today or access the white paper here.