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The Enemy Within the Insider: Detecting the Insider Threat Through Addiction Theory

“Insiders” remain a significant threat to organizations—evidenced by recent cases involving Robert Hansen, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden—even in light of significant movement toward neutralizing the threat through detection and prevention. Insiders pose detection challenges for security professionals because they often have legitimate access and intimate organizational knowledge. Nonetheless, past insider threat detection research has predominantly focused on signature-based detection of digital indicators of insider activity and behavioral profiling. This article develops a novel relationship between addiction theory and the insider threat from an information systems perspective. This discussion introduces seven propositions concerning this relationship, addiction antecedents, and the factors moderating the relationship between addiction and the insider threat. This model has significant implications for the insider threat detection challenge, as it provides new signals that may be useful for detection, supporting practitioners, and future research.