The RMIT research team is collaborating with CA (Pacific) Pty Ltd, the Australian/New Zealand subsidiary of international software company CA Technologies to develop methods of detecting internal threats to website security.

Researchers will use a $255,000 Australian Research Council Linkage Grant for this work that will focus on theft, sabotage and fraud to systems and databases by insiders.

The research is expected to help protect the public, as well as industry and government bodies, from potential damage due to exposure and identity theft, and will focus on detecting malicious acts by employees against e-commerce, database and communications security.

Chief Investigator, Associate Professor Serdar Boztas of the School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences, said theft, sabotage and fraud to systems and databases by insiders (authorised users) was the least understood and most acute threat to profitability of business via loss of production and reputation.

"This threat is an increasingly crucial issue to manage as the move to outsource business via cloud computing gathers momentum," he said.

"The ability to predict insider threats will enable pre-emptive countermeasures to be developed.

"However, there are formidable mathematical and software engineering challenges that need to be addressed in order to counter these threats."

By combining the expertise of computer security researchers from RMIT and CA, the team aims to automatically detect the early warning signs of insider attacks in order to prevent them.

"We've seen a number of high-profile inside attacks reported in the news media recently which have caused immense damage," Dr Steve Versteeg, a CA Labs researcher based in Melbourne, said.

"We're building a huge database of enterprise logs that we're correlating and analysing to detect suspicious patterns of behaviour.

"This research will put Australia at the forefront of inside attack prevention and help secure Australia's critical IT infrastructure," Dr Versteeg, a Chief Investigator on the project, said.

Tim Brown, Senior Vice-President and Chief Architect for Security for CA Technologies, said: "Insider threat detection is one of the most challenging technical issues faced by industry and governments today.

"I look forward to incorporating some of the research results into our security products in order to better meet our customers' needs."

Professor Xinghuo Yu, Director of the RMIT Platform Technologies Research Institute, said it was important that RMIT researchers produced outcomes addressing one of the national research priority areas, in this case Safeguarding Australia.

"The project represents one step in the right direction to fight crime such as fraud, identity theft, information stealing, IT sabotage and espionage.

"Securing cyberspace is of highest importance to Australia's security and will position Australia as a world leader in the field of insider threat protection."

Insider threats forms one of the diverse areas of research performed by the InfoSec-Informatics research group in the School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences at RMIT, which also offers postgraduate degrees in Information Security and Assurance.