Insiders can be dangerous and insidious attackers. They may have a high level of access to the system they are attacking.
Really successful crimes generally involve an insider. A crime survey reveals that in the early days of railroads, the insiders were railroad employees who knew the trains’ timetables and delivery schedules. They could tell the rest of the gang which trains carried cash and where they would be passing through.
Across the spectrum, the insider might be someone who works inside a bank, an insurance company, or a casino or, better still, someone who is able to manipulate a computer system.
They are not always employees. They can be consultants, suppliers, or contractors including security guards or cleaning staff. People who remain in a building when everyone else goes home. They may be employees or family members who can get access because of their relationship. Nollywood depicted this in one movie in which a relative was allowed into the hospital ward of an important person in a vegetative state whose recovery could reset the button on the race for a hidden family treasure. The latter was killed by the family visitor.
Revenge. envy, financial gain, institutional change, or institutional destruction can motivate insiders. Other attackers can become or buy insiders in order to gain access or knowledge.
Is it any surprise that some police officers commit the very crime they are supposed to defend against? Some may be criminals who by some luck or lack of awareness, passed through vetting to be enlisted, only to use the official garb as a facade. Some have been caught in armed robberies, whereas the disappearance of case dockets has sent tongues wagging.
A brilliant news reporter whose career was to be dogged by several conspiratorial allegations by rival colleagues later found himself trapped in their plot. They wanted to get him arrested for the flimsiest of reasons. The police came after him just after the reporter had concluded work on an important story involving high-profile figures. Here, the timing of his arrest spoke volumes about an insider job, which was nothing else than a tip-off.
A boy was recently murdered at Amasaman, a suburb of Accra, Ghana. Neighbors wailed with the bereaved family. The truth only came out after an eye-witness to a phase of the horrific incident surprised everybody with the picture of the vehicle from which the dead boy was dropped near a bush. The vehicle belonged to the neighbor who then had to confess to what he described as accidental.
Insiders can be exceedingly difficult to stop because an organization or group is forced to trust them. Think of a bank employee purposefully miss-setting the time lock to give his burglar friends easy access. A stockbroker can use propriety knowledge to manipulate fortunes in the market.
Reports have it that in 1978, a man called Stanley Mark Rifkin who worked as a consultant at the Security National Bank in Los Angeles, USA, applied his insider knowledge of the money transfer system to move several million dollars into a Swiss account and then to convert that money into diamonds. He also programmed the computer system to automatically erase the backup tapes that contained evidence of his crime. He was only arrested after he bragged about it, otherwise, he would have gotten away with it.
Insiders are always in the perfect position to commit fraud or sabotage, and even worse is management or a family’s unwillingness to admit initially that an attack might have come from within, which is, in effect, an admission of a management failure or shortsightedness on the part of the affected family. In the infamous Kofi Kyintoh murder in 1988 in Ghana, the victim was killed by his own uncle Benjamin Effah. He was found guilty by a Tribunal and executed.