Balancing Trust, Privacy, and Monitoring in Insider Risk Programs

The traditional image of an insider threat is an employee deliberately stealing information or sabotaging an organization. In reality, insider risk is considerably broader.

Employees and contractors can deliberately facilitate fraud or crime, but they can also be compromised through social engineering, have credentials stolen, make genuine mistakes, or be placed under financial, personal, or criminal pressure.

This distinction matters. If insider threat programs begin with the assumption that employees themselves are the problem, the natural response is greater surveillance. If organizations instead view insider risk as the interaction of people, opportunity, access, systems, and external threats, they can build much more targeted controls.

Understanding the broader scope of risk is essential because insider threats can have serious consequences: fraud and procurement manipulation, theft of intellectual property and equipment, disclosure of sensitive information, financial loss, operational disruption, and reputational damage — and, particularly in critical infrastructure and sensitive technology environments, potential loss of state and industrial secrets and risks to physical safety.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the US federal agency responsible for coordinating efforts to reduce cyber and physical risks to critical infrastructure, and ENISA¹, its European equivalent, recommend a proactive, prevention-focused approach. Under this approach, organizations define the insider threats relevant to their environment, identify warning indicators, assess their significance, and manage risk before concerning behavior develops into a damaging incident.

That means asking questions such as: Who has access to our most important assets? What actions should genuinely be considered unusual for a particular role? Where could one person circumvent a critical process? Which employees or contractors might be targeted by criminals or nation-state actors? And what controls would expose misuse without unnecessarily collecting personal information?

CISA sets out its core principles of mitigation as follows:

• Definition: recognize that insiders include employees, temporary workers, contractors, and vendors who possess insider knowledge or access.
• Detection: focus on identifying observable, concerning behaviors rather than relying on rigid personal profiles.
• Assessment: analyze whether a person of concern has both the intent and the capability to cause disruption or harm.
• Management: use multi-disciplinary interventions, reporting templates, and coordinated team responses to mitigate risk before incidents escalate. 

Ports and freight networks combine large workforces, contractors, transport companies, freight forwarders, shipping lines, customs processes, physical security, and increasingly interconnected IT and operational technology. ENISA notes that ports are highly interconnected ecosystems in which partners and vendors may have continuing access to systems, infrastructure, and data, increasing the potential attack surface. It also stresses that cyber-risk assessments need to consider the human element as well as technology.

Organized crime has recognized those characteristics too. Europol's analysis of major European ports found that criminal networks have sought access through corrupted or compromised insiders across shipping companies, freight forwarders, transport businesses, terminals, and other organizations. One tactic involves obtaining container reference information so illicit shipments can be extracted with less risk of detection. Europol describes corruption as a key enabler of criminal infiltration into ports, and cargo theft has shifted toward fraudulent carriers, identity deception, compromised credentials, and insider collusion rather than physical intrusion alone.

The lesson extends well beyond logistics. A comparatively small number of individuals with the right access can provide disproportionately valuable information or capabilities to an external threat actor.

Effective monitoring should therefore focus on identifying meaningful deviations from expected activity. User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), for example, can help establish operational baselines and identify anomalies: unusual access to information, unexpected use of privileged accounts, changes in working patterns, abnormal data movement, or activity inconsistent with an individual's role.

When combined appropriately with HR, physical access, contractor, IT, and operational information, these signals can provide context that an isolated alert cannot. Organizations such as CISA and ENISA advocate precisely this cross-domain approach, including continuous monitoring capable of identifying behavioral drift and visibility extending to contractors and third parties.

Crucially, an alert should be a reason to understand what has happened, not evidence of guilt. There may be a perfectly legitimate explanation. That principle helps distinguish intelligent insider risk management from blanket employee surveillance.

The technical ability to collect information does not automatically justify collecting it. Privacy regulators increasingly expect workplace monitoring to have a defined purpose and to be necessary and proportionate. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), for example, says employers should clearly establish why monitoring is required and use the least intrusive means capable of achieving that objective. It also warns that excessive monitoring can interfere with privacy, damage well-being, and negatively affect trust between workers and employers.

The same philosophy is reflected in the EU’s GDPR principles of purpose limitation and data minimization: personal data should be collected for specified and legitimate purposes, and organizations should limit collection to what is necessary for those purposes. These principles provide useful practical guardrails for insider risk programs anywhere, even where the precise legal framework differs.

Organizations should be able to explain what they monitor, why they monitor it, who can access the resulting information, how long that information is retained, and what governance applies when an alert is generated. Where monitoring could materially affect employees' privacy, appropriate legal and privacy review should form part of program design rather than being added after the technology has been deployed.

There is another reason to avoid excessive surveillance: it can make organizations less secure. Employees are often an organization's best early-warning system. They notice unusual requests, inappropriate attempts to obtain access, changes in colleagues' behavior, suspicious approaches, and weaknesses in processes.

If people believe an insider risk program exists primarily to investigate them, they may become less willing to raise concerns or disclose that they themselves have been approached, manipulated, or placed under pressure. Excessive monitoring can damage morale, encourage people to circumvent oversight, and discourage employees from speaking openly.

A mature ITMP therefore combines technology with clear policies, awareness training, confidential reporting mechanisms, and support for employees experiencing coercion, financial pressure, or other vulnerabilities. Governance should bring together security, HR, legal, compliance, IT, and relevant operational functions so that decisions are proportionate and viewed from more than one perspective.

The CISA ‘POEM’ Framework for Insider Threat Management Teams

Key stages:

• Plan: establish goals, legal compliance guidelines, and clear reporting thresholds.
• Organize: build multi-disciplinary teams drawing expertise from security, human resources, and legal departments.
• Execute: deploy reporting tools and evaluate behavioral indicators collaboratively.
• Maintain: continuously update training, foster a culture of trust, and review program resilience.

This approach delivers benefits beyond detecting deliberate misconduct. It can reduce fraud and data loss, expose compromised credentials earlier, improve control of third-party risk, strengthen investigations, and help organizations intervene before relatively minor warning signs develop into major incidents.

Ultimately, trust and security should not be treated as competing objectives. The most effective insider risk program is not necessarily the one collecting the most information. It is the one that knows which risks matter, monitors for relevant behavior, applies strong privacy safeguards, communicates openly with employees, and responds to warning indicators fairly and consistently.

In logistics, financial services, technology, or any other industry built around trusted access, that distinction is increasingly important. The objective is not to watch more. It is to understand risk better while preserving the trust on which resilient organizations depend.

Learn more about protecting people, assets, and operations from the inside with Crisis24's Insider Threat Management.

^{1 European Union Agency for Cybersecurity}