Integrating quantitative and qualitative reasoning to mitigate threats

Traditional threat assessment approaches used by insider threat hubs and law enforcement are primarily reactive, focusing on the response to an incident and collecting forensic data to support the investigation. More mature, proactive programmes aim to prevent or mitigate risks with specialised behavioural threat assessment analysts, who use multidisciplinary approaches to identify and manage at-risk individuals before an incident occurs. Threat assessment methods range from the use of individual, unstructured clinical judgments to formal qualitative models that provide structured guidelines, to predictive analytic models. This paper describes the aims and characteristics of qualitative and quantitative models to anticipate insider threats and discusses the integration of these traditionally divergent threat assessment methods, highlighting the importance of combining human judgment, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop holistic risk management strategies. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.