Contrastive Learning for Insider Threat Detection

M. S. Vinay, Shuhan Yuan, Xintao Wu

Abstract: Insider threat detection techniques typically employ supervised learning models for detecting malicious insiders by using insider activity audit data. In many situations, the number of detected malicious insiders is extremely limited. To address this issue, we present a contrastive learning-based insider threat detection framework, CLDet, and empirically evaluate its efficacy in detecting malicious sessions that contain malicious activities from insiders. We evaluate our framework along with state-of-the-art baselines on two unbalanced benchmark datasets. Our framework exhibits relatively superior performance on these unbalanced datasets in effectively detecting malicious sessions.