Development of an Malicious Insider Composite Vulnerability Assessment Methodology

Trusted employees pose a major threat to information systems. Despite ad-vances in prevention, detection, and response techniques, the number of maliciousinsider incidents and their associated costs have yet to decline. There are very fewvulnerability and impact models capable of providing information owners with theability to comprehensively assess the effectiveness an organization's malicious insidermitigation strategies.This research uses a multi-dimensional approach: content analysis, attack treeframework, and an intent driven taxonomy model are used to develop a maliciousinsider Decision Support System (DSS) tool. The tool's output provides an assess-ment of a malicious insider's composite vulnerability levels based upon aggregatedvulnerability assessment and impact assessment levels.The DSS tool's utility and applicability is demonstrated using a notional ex-ample. This research gives information owners data to more appropriately allocatescarce security resources.