Companies take time to screen their potential employees during the application process, and government-job seekers undergo many additional investigative procedures, too. And yet once an individual is hired, the vetting process largely stops — even when he or she is given a position of great trust.

This is no longer adequate given recent rises in the frequency and costs of insider attacks, maintains Haystax Technology CEO Bryan Ware, because even employees who are well-trusted can sometimes ‘turn’ based on a variety of altered life circumstances, whether marital, legal or financial, or from any number of other hidden stresses that could affect their work performance or attitudes towards the organization itself. In other words, their relative riskiness can increase with little warning and few outward indicators.

In his latest piece for Network World, Ware advocates that public and private-sector enterprises strengthen their focus on what he calls continuous trustworthiness: “The idea that in a world of growing asymmetric threats, an organization has not just a right but an obligation to systematically re-evaluate on a regular basis whether individuals involved in its most sensitive operations pose any kind of risk to its systems, data, facilities or people.”

Ware, a regular Network World contributor, gives the example of a financial advisor who has gone through bankruptcy or had multiple DUIs. “Is that someone you’d want managing your life savings?”, he asks. In the same vein, Ware advocates for paying serious attention to new techniques and technologies organizations can use to identify and prevent employee threats in a more predictive manner. Ware stresses that it is vital for organizations to maintain civil rights and liberties even while employing tools and technology to “continuously verify that people in trusted jobs don’t present a risk financially, to the safety of those around them, or to national security.”

Haystax developed its Haystax Analytics Platform™ as the optimal solution for real-time predictive analysis of security threats from trusted insiders. The platform reasons like a team of expert analysts at scale to precisely identify the greatest threats to an organization’s critical systems, data, facilities and people, even when the indicators are hard to detect and regardless of whether the behavior being monitored is malicious, negligent or inadvertent.

For more of Ware’s Network World essays on insider threat and other security analytics topics, please click here. And for more information on Haystax’s unique, model-first approach to insider threat, please visit www.haystax.com.