Using PLSI-U to Detect Insider Threats from Email Traffic

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

Despite a technology bias that focuses on external electronic threats, insiders pose the greatest threat to commercial and government organizations. Once information on a specific topic has gone missing, being able to quickly determine who has shown an interest in that topic can allow investigators to focus their attention. Even more promising is when individuals can be found who have an interest in the topic but who have never communicated that interest within the organization. An employee’s interests can be discerned by data mining corporate email correspondence. These interests can be used to construct social networks that graphically expose investigative leads. This paper describes the use of Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI) [4] extended to include users (PLSI-U) to determine topics that are of interest to employees from their email activity. It then applies PLSI-U to the Enron email corpus and finds a small number of employees (0.02%) who appear to have had clandestine interests.

Comments

© 2006 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

The "Link to Full Text" on this page opens the article hosted through the SpringerNature SharedIt content sharing initiative. It is available for download.

A similar article was published in the International Journal of Security and Networks (2008) and is available from AFIT Scholar here.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-36891-4_8

Source Publication

Advances in Digital Forensics II

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