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Assessing and Profiling the Insider Threats in Information

Technology

By Dr. Joshua Sinai

The threat of insiders with malicious intent in a position of trust with access to critical aspects of
an organization’s Information Technology (IT) network, whether in government, the military, or
the private sector has become a paramount concern. One reason for the escalation in this threat
in the recent period is the massive and exponential explosion of available proprietary or
classified information within organizations and the relative ease of access by what are
presumed to be “trusted” IT professionals, ranging from data entry clerks to IT network
administrators, with a minority of such individuals seeking to appropriate such sensitive
information for their own political purposes.

Following several high profile cases of break-ins by such maliciously-intent insiders –
particularly by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden – cyber security practitioners are focused
on deriving lessons from such breaches in order to prevent such penetration and exposure of
their organizations’ classified IT systems from recurring.

In retrospect, however, these incidents – with Manning’s penetration reportedly occurring in
2009 and Snowden’s in mid-2013 – could have been prevented at their earliest pre-incident
phases had an equally serious case of inside penetration of a military’s classified information
system that had occurred in Israel in mid-2007 been more widely publicized, thereby alerting
other nations’ militaries that their classified information systems were vulnerable to insider
exploitation by similarly disgruntled employees.

Anat Kamm – The First High Profile Insider Threat in IT

In the Israeli case, in mid-2007 20-year-old Anat Kamm, who was in the final phase of
completing her compulsory two-year military service as assistant to the head of the bureau of
Major General Yair Naveh, then the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Central Command
(which has responsibility for military operations in the West Bank), proceeded to surreptitiously
download and copy onto a USB storage device an estimated 2,000 classified documents from
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several computers in the bureau, of which some 700 were “classified” or “top secret.”
In addition to the classified documents on targeted killings by Israel against suspected
Palestinian terrorists – reportedly the focus of Kamm’s “outrage” as a self-professed
whistleblower – these also included an indiscriminate collection of documents on numerous
other subjects, such as details of a planned invasion of Gaza, which was eventually launched in
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December 2008.
Yuval Diskin, at the time the head of the General Security Service (GSS) (also known as Shin
Bet), charged that the case "had the potential to cause grave damage to state security" because

38 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – November 2014 Edition
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