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While most organizations continue to invest in traditional network defences, a formidable security challenge has been brewing within their own boundaries. Malicious insiders with privileged access in the guise of a trusted source have carried out many attacks causing far-reaching damage to financial stability, national security and brand reputation for both public and private sector organizations. Growing exposure and impact of the whistleblower community and concerns about job security with changing organizational dynamics has further aggravated this situation. The unpredictability of malicious attackers, as well as the complexity of malicious actions, necessitates the careful analysis of network, system and user parameters correlated with the insider threat problem. Thus it creates a high dimensional, heterogeneous data analysis problem in isolating suspicious users. This research work proposes an insider threat detection framework, which utilizes the attributed graph clustering techniques and outlier ranking mechanism for enterprise users. Empirical results also confirm the effectiveness of the method by achieving the best area under the curve value of 0.7648 for the receiver operating characteristic curve.

While most security projects have focused on fending off attacks coming from outside the organizational boundaries, a real threat has arisen from the people who are inside those perimeter protections. Insider threats have shown their power by hugely affecting national security, financial stability, and the privacy of many thousands of people. What is in the news is the tip of the iceberg, with much more going on under the radar, and some threats never being detected. We propose a hybrid framework based on graphical analysis and anomaly detection approaches, to combat this severe cybersecurity threat. Our framework analyzes heterogeneous data in isolating possible malicious users hiding behind others. Empirical results reveal this framework to be effective in distinguishing the majority of users who demonstrate typical behavior from the minority of users who show suspicious behavior.