Predicting Insider Breaches Using Employee Reviews

ABSTRACT

Data breaches committed by current and former employees are of growing concern to organizations. This paper draws on instrumental and expressive motives to predict the likelihood of insider breaches. Our research uses employee reviews on glassdoor.com to infer employees’ instrumental and expressive motives. Specifically, review ratings were used to obtain instrumental motives, while the tone of the reviews revealed expressive motives. Logistic regression on a matched-sample comparison of 71 public firms (41 breached and 30 non-breached) showed that employees’ perceptions of the overall rating of the firm as well as the ratings of compensation and benefits are significantly correlated with insider breaches. Emotional tones of joy, fear, and anxiety were also found to be significant predictors of an insider breach. The study contributes to theory and practice by deepening our understanding of factors affecting insider breaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Insider data breaches
• expressive motives
• instrumental motives
• employee reviews
• tone analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^a https://privacyrights.org/data-breaches

^b https://www.glassdoor.com/about-us/

^c https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/tone-analyzer/science.html#the-science-behind-the-service

^d https://www.nasdaq.com/

^e http://www.hoovers.com/

^f https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/Ratings-on-Glassdoor?language=en_US