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Using Behavioral Analytics to Detect Insider Threats

Rick Janowski — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:12:37 +0000

Malicious insiders are finding increasingly complex ways to avoid detection, circumventing traditional information security measures. Monitoring of content is central to detecting insider threats, but still many insiders get away with corporate espionage every year. Is there another way to identify such acts?

Researchers Deanna D. Caputo, Greg Stephens, et al. at the MITRE Corporation believe human behavior is a key to detecting malicious threats. They ran a study in which participants were told to imagine they had fallen on hard times. Two experimental groups were told to collect information in order to receive a promotion with a higher salary. The “malicious” group was told that they had to bring insider information to a new company, while the control group was told to research non-sensitive information.

The study found distinct differences of behavior between the two groups. Malicious insiders demonstrated a consistent “quantity over quality” approach to ...
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Privacy and Big Data

Rick Janowski — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:40:25 +0000

In New York this week? Check out Cataphora CEO Elizabeth Charnock in conversation with GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram at Structure:Data. This conference is exploring the technical and business opportunities spurred by the growth of Big Data.

Elizabeth is specifically discussing the implications of privacy with respect to Big Data. Her dramatically-named session – Big Data, Bigger Brother – will look at the distinction between consumer and employee privacy, and the risk/reward issues for organizations and individuals.

Elizabeth will be on stage on Thursday, March 22, at 9:05 a.m. EST.

If you can’t get to Structure:Data in person, you can watch a live stream of the interview.

The Good and the Great

Elizabeth Charnock — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:11:01 +0000

A couple of weeks or so ago, I was interviewed by NPR reporter Yuki Noguchi about so-called “big data” and how mathematicians are now trendy and highly in demand. One of her questions was how a smaller, less well known company like Cataphora could compete for talent in this market. I explained that one key advantage we have is that we can tell the difference between the really great candidates and the merely good ones, that this was not all that trivial to do in reality, and that it is often important to the really great ones to be understood by their management to be really great ones. Consider that the great artist, whether a painter, a chef, or a geek, always savors his or her work being appreciated by someone who truly understands it. This exchange, plus the recent Monaco Media Forum, have made me ...
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Monaco Media Forum 2011

Elizabeth Charnock — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:38:27 +0000

On the surface, what Cataphora has to do with “Screen Wars,” a conversation about television and its ongoing collision with the Internet and new media, is not so obvious. “Screen Wars” is the theme for this year’s Monaco Media Forum; last year, for example, it centered around mobile devices and the implications of such. While a tongue in cheek response might be that Big Brother is everywhere, in reality, the world of television functions as just one more application of Big Data analytics. At Cataphora, we are particularly interested in this notion of Digital Character™ and more specifically, what insights can be drawn about individuals as an ever greater percentage of their daily doings are electronically recorded. This electronically recorded data is, of course, not just recorded for the sake of posterity in some abstract sense, but also functions as a powerful vehicle for marketers ...
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Steve Jobs – A Personal Perspective

Elizabeth Charnock — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:16:36 +0000

As it happened, Ron Weissman was in our office when our CFO popped her head in to tell him that Steve Jobs had died. Ron worked for Steve as VP of Corporate Marketing at NeXT back in the day, and still considered him a friend. Ron very sadly noted that it was the end of an era.

He is right.

Steve Jobs utterly dominated anything he set out to touch, even if it took him many years to do it. These days, we are easily impressed with one-trick ponies. By contrast, Steve Jobs has the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and Pixar to his credit. He wasn’t afraid to take large risks. Most of these risks succeeded and changed the world forever. Those that didn’t, like the elegant NeXT machine that never found a broad market, he managed to come back from, just as ...
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Big (Bad) Data, Character and Identity

Elizabeth Charnock — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:30:51 +0000

Whether you believe the hype around Big Data or not, the amount of information available in large organizations continues to grow every day. And it’s not simply a question of volume, its also the variety of data: emails, IM’s, video, text messages, tweets, Facebook updates, geo-location data, and more. This abundance of data affords the possibility of knowing far more about a person than was previously possible, but there’s also the possibility of being far more wrong than ever before. Bad data has the potential of undermining the benefits of Big Data.

Some problems are long-standing, but are now amplified by the ease of information distribution. Consider something as simple as sending out yearly holiday cards. Despite the fact that people send cards to those they presumably already know, every year some number of cards are invariably returned. Now imagine this kind of bad ...
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Connecting the Dots of Big Data

Rick Janowski — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:43:41 +0000

One of the implicit benefits of the growing Big Data phenomenon is that individuals, businesses, and governments will have the means to connect the dots; to make sense of information in the aggregate that does not necessarily make itself apparent in the specific. A form of digital archeology, if you will. In this post we’ll examine a few very notable examples of discrete information that, in retrospect, turned out to be vital in a larger context.

Disclaimers are important here. Every situation is different and the nuance of human communication always brings a high degree of difficulty to the table. When we are brought in to assess potential wrongful behavior within a business or government entity, we bring years of experience but no a priori assumptions. This type of analysis precludes any cookie cutter approach. That being said, there are always clues. ...
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Getting Big Brother Right

Rick Janowski — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:26:08 +0000

The biggest concern employees should have is not whether their communication is being monitored – that is a fait accompli for today’s largest businesses. The greater concern is whether that communication is monitored appropriately and accurately so as to protect both employer and employee from a variety of risks, while minimizing any invasions of privacy. Even smaller businesses are starting to monitor their employees, as one really bad apple employee can literally take down a smaller business. And, occasionally, a larger one, as happened with Barings Bank.

Given the stakes involved, here are six top reasons why employees would want their communications monitored.

If you’ve got nothing to hide, don’t hide anything. Most of us will say all kinds of things on our cell phone while in our cubicle, but cringe at the idea of our electronic communications being monitored. Yet the people in cubes near ...
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Thoughts on big data

Rick Janowski — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:46:35 +0000

Fast-paced and with much content to provoke thought and interesting discussion, the Ideas Economy conference on big data was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It was a jam-packed day and half, with most presentations limited to 10-15 minutes – a pleasant change from the more typical conference fare of long days full of hour-long or more PowerPoint slideshows. My CEO, Elizabeth Charnock, was a participant in a panel discussion of “Security and anomalies in the age of big data.” Indeed, security of data, individual and corporate privacy, and transparency of data, and how to balance each of these, were recurring themes of the conference as a whole

In truth, the panel did not spend much time discussing the anomalies part of their remit. Which leads to a broader observation about the conference as a whole: Amidst the many excellent presentations about handling big ...
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A big step forward

Elizabeth Charnock — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:41:24 +0000

When I give talks about what it takes to succeed with a startup, I often note that patience and level-headedness are highly underrated virtues.

Today’s announcement about Ernst & Young acquiring Cataphora Legal (the portion of Cataphora dealing with the legal market) is a great example of this. Cataphora’s plan had always been to use e-discovery as a bootstrapping mechanism; as a long-term tactic for both funding the company’s R&D and for providing the corpora of real world field data for it. As the e-discovery market became increasingly commoditized in recent years, the right home for Cataphora Legal was clearly in a respected consultancy such as E&Y rather than a world-class Silicon Valley software company. So I am delighted with this outcome.

So far as we know, no pre-IPO startup has ever divested a business unit, so once again Cataphora goes its own way in capitalization ...
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