18. An Organizational Visualization Profiler Tool Based on Social Interactions

Complex organizational environments require highly-skilled employees who are both good at their everyday work and at the same time digitally literate, capable of using communication platforms and social media. Moreover, the familiarization of employees with technology and their tendency to bring their own devices at work, has created an additional headache for information security officers who fear that several backdoors can be opened to the organization security infrastructure not only by the misuse of the devices but also by a potentially highly-skilled employee. The proposed, in this chapter, social profiler tool aims at identifying potential inside threats using organizational information i.e., communication messages either from emails or social media. The information collected is then analyzed using a custom vocabulary which contains keywords related to the sensitive information of the organization in order to produce a list of employees who can potentially become insider threats. Finally, the social profiler tool incorporates six different visualizations of the employees under investigation with attributes such as their behavioral profile, ego network, word cloud, and a comparative profile of each employee in contrast to other profiles in their network. The tool’s effectiveness has been tested with an actual business communication dataset using a well-established generic vocabulary demonstrating promising results.