Using Big Data Analysis To Protect Against Internal Threats

The disgruntled engineer, the employee angling for a new job, or just the chatty manager who likes to tell people how much he knows about the business – they may all constitute a potential threat to a company. Steve Henn, writing in Today’s General Counsel, explains how big data analysis can address these kinds of risks, as well as others that are more systemic. One example: a bank that had received notice from a regulator and had to quickly analyze 1.5 million loan documents. A major challenge in all these cases is being able to analyze “unstructured data,” which refers to things like email and other forms of communication on social media (as opposed to structured data bases like financial reports). It’s doable, the author writes: Create cross-disciplinary legal and IT teams, and then use “big-data analytics technologies to analyze dozens of sources, to detect signs of malicious action and intent early on.”