Protecting Against Insider Threats with Strider’s Strategic Intelligence Platform

Insider threats remain one of the most complex and consequential risks organizations face today. Unlike external cyberattacks or obvious physical intrusions, insider threats often arise from trusted individuals—employees, contractors, or research partners—who exploit their access to sensitive data, intellectual property, or systems. While not every insider threat is malicious, the potential damage is significant: intellectual property theft, reputational harm, regulatory violations, and compromised national security.

At Strider, we recognize that the insider threat challenge is no longer limited to disgruntled employees or lone actors. Increasingly, these risks are linked to state-sponsored efforts that target organizations through talent recruitment, supply chain infiltration, and research partnerships. Our products are designed to give organizations the visibility and intelligence they need to identify these risks early, mitigate vulnerabilities, and protect what matters most.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how Strider’s suite of products empowers organizations to protect against insider threats by uncovering hidden affiliations, mapping risky connections, and delivering actionable intelligence.

Understanding the Modern Insider Threat

Traditional security models focused on access control and monitoring system anomalies. While these remain important, they fall short when insiders are recruited or influenced by foreign adversaries. For example, researchers may be courted by state-backed talent recruitment programs that encourage them to transfer cutting-edge innovations abroad. Or an employee may conceal ties to a foreign military entity during the hiring process.

These risks are especially acute in sectors like defense, high tech, energy, and academia—where sensitive intellectual property is both highly valuable and highly targeted. The challenge is that many of these threats do not leave digital fingerprints in the early stages.

Instead, they are rooted in affiliations, backgrounds, and institutional relationships that require deep analysis of open-source intelligence and proprietary data.

This is where Strider’s products deliver unmatched value.

When hiring, vetting researchers, or evaluating collaborators, organizations often rely on self-disclosed resumes and standard background checks. Unfortunately, these methods are often insufficient when individuals deliberately conceal foreign ties.

Strider’s People Search addresses this gap by aggregating and analyzing open-source intelligence to uncover connections to high-risk entities, such as foreign intelligence services, governments, and militaries. With this capability, organizations can:

By enabling proactive screening, People Search helps organizations ensure trust in their workforce and avoid inadvertently granting access to individuals who may pose an insider threat.

Insider threats don’t always come from direct employees. Contractors, research partners, and suppliers can serve as entry points for state-sponsored influence. Often, affiliations are hidden in complex ownership structures or through partnerships with universities and institutes that serve as fronts for foreign militaries.

Strider’s Organizations Search empowers leaders to understand these hidden relationships within their organizations. Specifically, the Organizations Search tool reveals:

For example, before entering into an academic collaboration, a university can use Organizations Search to determine whether a foreign partner has ties to a hostile nation. By making these risks visible, Organizations Search prevents insider threats from entering through seemingly trusted third parties.

Insider risks also extend to the software ecosystem. With open source software now serving as the foundation of many mission-critical systems, organizations face growing exposure if contributors to their code base have risky affiliations.

Strider’s Open Source Software Search (OSS Search) screens contributors across an organization’s software supply chain. By analyzing repositories and contributor backgrounds, OSS Search uncovers:

In an era where a single compromised software library can ripple across industries, OSS Search adds a critical layer of defense against insider threats buried in code.

While detection and screening are essential, insider threat mitigation also requires a proactive approach to awareness and resilience. That’s where Strider’s Insights—our advanced intelligence—comes in.

Insights provides organizations with tailored strategic intelligence about which research areas, technologies, or people are most likely to be targeted by foreign adversaries. This intelligence enables organizations to:

By shifting the conversation from reactive to proactive, Insights ensures organizations can anticipate and blunt insider threat recruitment before it succeeds.

Insider threats often communicate with foreign sponsors through digital channels, blending into the noise of everyday email and network traffic. To help organizations spot these signals, Strider developed Shield.

Shield delivers a curated, expert-verified dataset of high-risk email addresses, domains, and multilingual keywords associated with state-sponsored actors. Integrated via API into an organization’s SIEM or DLP system, Shield enables:

By integrating Shield into existing systems, organizations gain a powerful capability to detect when insiders are engaging with adversarial entities.

The insider threat problem is multi-faceted: it spans people, partnerships, software, and communications. Strider’s holistic approach ensures that organizations can address these risks from every angle:

Together, these tools give organizations the visibility and intelligence to detect risks early, respond decisively, and stay compliant with regulations. More importantly, they empower leaders to safeguard their people, technology, and intellectual property from insider threats driven by state-sponsored actors.

Spark, Strider’s proprietary AI engine, is layered onto each existing product. With Spark, organizations have the ability to security integrate internal DLP data with Strider’s AI risk intelligence for deeper, data-driven risk insights. It also features an intuitive chat interface with real-time analysis and query, suggested searches, multilingual data input, and sourcing for original intelligence sources.

Insider threats will never be fully eliminated—but they can be managed. The key is understanding that these risks are not random but often deliberate, coordinated efforts by nation-state actors. By shining light on hidden affiliations, risky partnerships, and subtle recruitment efforts, Strider helps organizations take back control.

With Strider’s products, insider threat protection becomes less about suspicion and more about clarity. Organizations gain the confidence to collaborate, innovate, and grow—knowing they are protected by intelligence built for the modern era of geopolitical competition.