“Mission Possible”: How DTEX is Supporting National Security from the Inside Out

When considering the most significant cyber threats to the public sector, many immediately think of foreign adversaries breaching federal agencies. This perception is understandable, as nation-state cyber attacks often dominate headlines. However, the real threat might be closer to home. Imagine if the breach originated from within the agency itself – if a nation-state or cybercriminal group compromised an internal employee’s account, perhaps by purchasing access, bribing, or extorting the employee. What if the employee made the innocent mistake of uploading sensitive data to ChatGPT or, worse, acted with malicious intent? These scenarios are increasingly prevalent in today’s cybersecurity landscape and are situations DTEX responds to regularly at our customer base.

Employees are often overlooked as potential security or business risks, beyond the usual concerns of falling for phishing scams. Yet, the damage caused by insiders can be immense – regardless of motive. Adding to the concern is the fast-evolving threat environment which has never been more ambiguous, blending shades of grey rather than black and white. The shift to remote work, coupled with rising nationalism, complicates this landscape further, rendering both federal agencies and commercial entities more vulnerable to espionage and IP theft. The unfortunate truth is that insider risk is a growing problem, exacerbated by current socioeconomic conditions and the divisive climate many employees now navigate.

This is particularly true in the public sector where federal agencies are tasked with safeguarding high-value, sensitive data. They have an urgent need to better understand insider risk to comply with U.S. Executive Order 13587, which requires agencies investigate when credible allegations are made by an employee concerning the behavior of a peer. The value of an effective insider risk program is to identify early warning risk indicators to increase awareness around the pattern of activity during a sometimes-slow moving attack.

How DTEX is supporting national security 

At DTEX, we understand the risks insiders pose to both the public and private sectors. Building awareness and providing education around insider risk management across federal agencies is a major focus of ours, and we continue to take significant strides to this end. We continue to invest in our federal team, having recently hired Chris Harris, DTEX’s Senior Vice President, Public Sector, to oversee and guide our important work in this important space. Chris has spent the better part of his career working with federal agencies and preparing them to defend against cyber threats. Bringing him aboard is a big win for DTEX, and he will play a key role in supporting national security from the inside out and accelerate insider risk management adoption.

DTEX also recently announced our partnership with Carahsoft, Coalfire and Google Public Sector to fast-track FedRAMP accreditation. We are excited to be the first company to participate in this new accelerator program. We work across the Federal Systems Integrator (FSI) and Value-Added Reseller (VAR) ecosystem with a wide range of partners and nearly a year ago, we expanded our strategic partnership with GuidePoint Federal, joining their Emerging Cyber Vendor Program. This partnership has enabled us to extend our support across federal agencies and provide guidance on how to manage insider risk more proactively. Additionally, DTEX has long been working closely with MITRE as part of a public-private partnership to help the entire industry advance insider risk programs. On a personal level, protecting federal agencies (and commercial organizations) against foreign adversaries is something I am very familiar with, having served in the US Marine Corps for eight years and at Mandiant/Google for 17 years. Taken together, these are real, tangible proof points of a commitment to serving the federal market.

Enabling a trusted and protected workforce

DTEX understands that the mission comes first for federal agencies. From a technology and capabilities perspective, DTEX has several differentiators that align with the missions of the various federal agencies while addressing their pain points and gaps. For example, DTEX InTERCEPT is the only unified insider risk management platform that consolidates the User Activity Monitoring (UAM) capabilities required under the Committee on National Security Systems Directive (CNSSD) 504 with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and User Behavior Analytics (UBA) in a single cloud-native platform. We support the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s updated Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF 2.0) to provide a comprehensive approach for effectively managing cyber risks. We also support the Department of Defense’s (DoD) strategic goals to achieve its vision for Zero Trust through culture, adoption, and practice. The DTEX Ai³ Risk Assistant – the first assistant for insider risk management – also sets DTEX apart, empowering risk leaders to simplify and accelerate the most complex insider threat investigations. Finally, DTEX just announced new capabilities to protect organizations from insiders intentionally, or unintentionally, leaking data to public GenAI solutions via uploaded files and prompt engineering.

Our customers often highlight how InTERCEPT is easier to deploy with faster time-to-value compared with other market solutions. The fact that the platform offers full on-prem feature parity is another major benefit to federal agencies that have restrictions around where they are deploying and where their data is hosted. DTEX’s privacy-first approach to insider risk management is another standout differentiator. Our patented Pseudonymization technique tokenizes personally identifiable information, enabling GDPR compliance by default. Where justified, the tokenization can be reversed to escalate malicious investigations and to meet CNSSD 504.

As we move forward, DTEX will continue to work closely with our collaborative ecosystem of world-class customers and partners to support federal agencies with the knowledge and solutions they need to stay resilient against insider threats.

Learn how DTEX is supporting national security or request a demo to see InTERCEPT in action.