SV-02 · Human and access risk
Insider Threat Assessment
A controlled look at how legitimate access could be misused — and whether your governance, controls, and response would prevent or expose it.
01 Overview
Why this engagement
Most security programs are built to keep attackers out. Insider risk starts from a harder question: what happens when the person misusing access is already trusted?
This assessment examines how legitimate access could be abused, and whether existing governance, technical controls, and response processes would prevent it — or at least expose it quickly.
Questions it answers
What could a trusted employee, contractor, or partner do with the access they already have?
Do our joiner, mover, and leaver processes remove access when they should?
Would we detect sensitive data leaving — and could we prove what happened?
02 Method
How the engagement runs
5 controlled phases. Each one ends with a concrete output you can review before the next begins.
Phase 1: Establish risk scenarios
We identify sensitive assets, high-trust roles, legal constraints, and plausible insider scenarios. The focus is realistic harm — never monitoring individuals.
OutputAgreed abuse-case catalog
Phase 2: Map access and trust
I review how access is granted, changed, monitored, and removed across selected systems, with attention to privilege creep, segregation of duties, and exception paths.
OutputAccess and trust map
Phase 3: Review preventive controls
Policies and technical safeguards are tested against each scenario — approval workflows, data controls, logging, and joiner-mover-leaver processes.
OutputControl-gap evidence
Phase 4: Validate detection and response
Where authorized, controlled test events or tabletop exercises show how alerting, investigation, escalation, and evidence preservation perform in practice.
OutputDetection and response observations
Phase 5: Report and prioritize
Each abuse case is explained with supporting evidence, likely impact, existing safeguards, and prioritized improvements with clear owners.
OutputReport and safeguard plan
03 Scope
What can be assessed
Exact coverage is set by the agreed scenarios and scope.
- Privileged accounts
- Sensitive repositories
- Collaboration platforms
- Data movement controls
- Third-party access
- Employee lifecycle
04 Safeguards
Privacy and fairness
The assessment is about risk and controls, not about people. It is designed to protect employees as much as the organization.
- Minimum necessary data, documented authorization
- Agreed privacy and legal safeguards
- No profiling of individuals
- No suspicion attributed to named employees
- Limited retention of any collected evidence
// Primary deliverable
A report built to be acted on
Every engagement ends with a detailed written report — readable by leadership, precise enough for engineers — followed by a technical readout and an optional executive debrief.
- Executive risk summary
- Prioritized insider abuse cases
- Access and control-gap evidence
- Process and monitoring observations
- Practical safeguards with owners
// More services