Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises

Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example

A systematic literature review on insider threats

Insider threats is the most concerned cybersecurity problem which is poorly addressed by widely used security solutions. Despite the fact that there have been several scientific publications in this area, but from our innovative study classification and structural taxonomy proposals, we argue to provide the more information about insider threats and defense measures used to counter them. While adopting the current grounded theory method for a thorough literature evaluation, our categorization's goal is to organize knowledge in insider threat research. Along with an analysis of major recent studies on detecting insider threats, the major goal of the study is to develop a classification of current types of insiders, levels of access, motivations behind it, insider profiling, security properties, and methods they use to attack. This includes use of machine learning algorithm, behavior analysis, methods of detection and evaluation. Moreover, actual incidents related to insider attacks have also been analyzed

A multiple-perspective approach for insider-threat risk prediction in cyber-security

Currently governments and research communities are concentrating on insider threat matters more than ever, the main reason for this is that the effect of a malicious insider threat is greater than before. Moreover, leaks and the selling of the mass data have become easier, with the use of the dark web. Malicious insiders can leak confidential data while remaining anonymous. Our approach describes the information gained by looking into insider security threats from the multiple perspective concepts that is based on an integrated three-dimensional approach. The three dimensions are human issue, technology factor, and organisation aspect that forms one risk prediction solution. In the first part of this thesis, we give an overview of the various basic characteristics of insider cyber-security threats. We also consider current approaches and controls of mitigating the level of such threats by broadly classifying them in two categories: a) technical mitigation approaches, and b) non-technical mitigation approaches. We review case studies of insider crimes to understand how authorised users could harm their organisations by dividing these cases into seven groups based on insider threat categories as follows: a) insider IT sabotage, b) insider IT fraud, c) insider theft of intellectual property, d) insider social engineering, e) unintentional insider threat incident, f) insider in cloud computing, and g) insider national security. In the second part of this thesis, we present a novel approach to predict malicious insider threats before the breach takes place. A prediction model was first developed based on the outcomes of the research literature which highlighted main prediction factors with the insider indicator variables. Then Bayesian network statistical methods were used to implement and test the proposed model by using dummy data. A survey was conducted to collect real data from a single organisation. Then a risk level and prediction for each authorised user within the organisation were analysed and measured. Dynamic Bayesian network model was also proposed in this thesis to predict insider threats for a period of time, based on data collected and analysed on different time scales by adding time series factors to the previous model. Results of the verification test comparing the output of 61 cases from the education sector prediction model show a good consistence. The correlation was generally around R-squared =0.87 which indicates an acceptable fit in this area of research. From the result we expected that the approach will be a useful tool for security experts. It provides organisations with an insider threat risk assessment to each authorised user and also organisations can discover their weakness area that needs attention in dealing with insider threat. Moreover, we expect the model to be useful to the researcher's community as the basis for understanding and future research

Audit Techniques for Service Oriented Architecture Applications

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach enables the development of flexible distributed applications. Auditing such applications implies several specific challenges related to interoperability, performance and security. The service oriented architecture model is described and the advantages of this approach are analyzed. We also highlight several quality attributes and potential risks in SOA applications that an architect should be aware when designing a distributed system. Key risk factors are identified and a model for risk evaluation is introduced. The top reasons for auditing SOA applications are presented as well as the most important standards. The steps for a successful audit process are given and discussed.Service Oriented Architecture, Audit, Quality Attributes, Interoperability, Performance, Security