Evaluating Presence and Use of Suicide Risk Indicators in Insider Threat Data

Presentation overview

This presentation will provide a high-level overview of our yearlong rigorous research study to determine whether cyber data contains enough ‘signal’ to provide early risk indicators of suicide. Our research findings stem from an analysis of extensive, real-world cyber data collected between 2017 and 2024 (over 1 million lines of keyboard data, 3.3. million words). The dataset includes all activities conducted on Federal workstations for 46 USG individuals who tragically died by suicide. We evaluated and prioritized the feasibility of observing viable behavioral indicators by cyber detectors in government host and network data. Additionally, computational analyses, including sentiment analysis and natural language processing, were conducted on this dataset and a control sample without suicide risk indicators. This presentation will share evidence-based, data-driven insights into the potential for leveraging cyber data to detect suicide risk in the workforce. By emphasizing observable behaviors and addressing practical limitations, this research aims to equip organizations with actionable strategies to improve suicide risk detection and response.

Biography

Dr. Deanna D. Caputo is the Chief Scientist for Insider Threat Capabilities and a Senior Principal Behavioral Psychologist at The MITRE Corporation, applying her deep expertise in the behavioral sciences to insider threat efforts across a broad work program. Deanna is an internationally recognized expert in insider threat, and at the intersection of cybersecurity and behavioral sciences. She has 25 years of experience designing, conducting, and analyzing research with human participants using experimental, quantitative, and qualitative analyses. During her 15-year career at MITRE, she has built and led MITRE’s Human Behavior and Cybersecurity capability area and dedicated team, focusing on operational research and consultation on human behavior and cybersecurity, particularly usable security and technology adoption, cyber risk perceptions and awareness, and cybersecurity teams and exercise assessment.

Simultaneously, Dr. Caputo built and currently leads MITRE’s Insider Threat Capability and multi-disciplinary team. She created and pioneered the development of data-driven, cyber-physical, and psycho-social Insider Threat solutions as repeatable offerings for all government sponsors and critical infrastructure industry partners. These include 18 IP disclosures and the creation of an air-gapped, secure MITRE Insider Threat Lab. Dr. Caputo created MITRE’s Insider Threat Behavioral Risk Framework after years of working within insider threat programs and conducting applied research. She uses rigorous behavioral science methodologies and analytics to deter, detect, and mitigate insider risks and threats by collecting data from real employees. This real-life data is used to identify and analyze how human behavior manifests in cyber and non-cyber sensors and develop evidence-based solutions to identify and change employee attitudes, intentions, and/or behaviors. Dr. Caputo was the only researcher trusted to curate and analyze for four years all of the Project Slammer data from 45 convicted spies to develop the first psycho-social insider risk indicators.