Create the Taxonomy for Unintentional Insider Threat via Text Mining and Hierarchical Clustering Analysis

Abstract

The unintentional activities of system users can jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and assurance of data on information systems. These activities, known as unintentional insider threat activities, account for a significant percentage of data breaches. A method to mitigate or prevent this threat is using smart systems or artificial intelligence (AI). The construction of an AI requires the development of a taxonomy of activities. The literature review focused on data breach threats, mitigation tools, taxonomy usage in cybersecurity, and taxonomy development using Endnote and Google Scholar. This study aims to develop a taxonomy of unintentional insider threat activities based on narrative descriptions of the breach events in public data breach databases. The public databases were from the California Department of Justice, US Health and Human Services, and Verizon, resulting in 1850 examples of human errors. A taxonomy was constructed to specify the dimensions and characteristics of objects. Text mining and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to create the taxonomy, indicating a quantitative approach. Ward’s agglomeration coefficient was used to ensure the cluster was valid. The resulting top-level taxonomy categories are application errors, communication errors, inappropriate data permissions, lost media, and misconfigurations.