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From Rogue Employees to Rogue Agents: Repurposing Insider Threat Detection for AI Agent Governance

Authors: Rimal, Bipin;

From Rogue Employees to Rogue Agents: Repurposing Insider Threat Detection for AI Agent Governance

Abstract

AI agent monitoring and insider threat detection share the same architecture: profile a baseline, flag deviations, encode assumptions about trust. We make this concrete across thirteen experiments. Using a Unified Behavioural Feature Schema (UBFS) that maps both employee activity logs and agent execution traces into a shared representation, we apply three anomaly detection models-Isolation Forest, LSTM Autoencoder, and Deep Clustering-across five domains. Cross-domain transfer works: an Isolation Forest trained on 329,000 insider threat user-days retains 97% of detection power on agent traces, and transfer to MCP tool-calling benchmarks exceeds within-domain performance (104.8% retention). But the blind spots transfer too. Model distillation attacks span a detection spectrum from trivially caught (FOCUSED extraction: 0.99 AUC-ROC) to nearchance (HYDRA distributed: 0.54), and task decompositionsplitting a malicious objective into innocent subtasks-costs 5-6% detection power for IF and DC (p=0.031, Wilcoxon signed-rank), while LSTM Autoencoder shows near-invariance (-0.7%, p=0.094). Synthetic OWASP profiling identifies Tool Misuse (ASI02) as a blind spot (∼0.52 AUC-ROC), but real-data validation on 500 ATBench trajectories reveals that this blind spot is an artifact of circular synthetic methodology: real ASI02 achieves 0.81-0.94 AUC-ROC across all models and feature sets. Augmenting UBFS with eight semantic features (UBFS-28) improves detection by up to 13% on real data. Distillation sensitivity analysis shows detection degrades monotonically with attack intensity for FOCUSED/BROAD/COT profiles, while HYDRA remains near-chance regardless of scale. Adversarial evasion testing reveals that mimicry attacks degrade detection by up to 25%, with Memory Poisoning (ASI05) most vulnerable. Temporal window ablation finds that 10 spans are optimal for Isolation Forest on both TRAIL and ATBench. Mapping five MITRE ATLAS techniques [1] into the UBFS confirms that the framework generalises beyond OWASP: all five techniques are strongly detectable (>0.93 AUC-ROC for IF/LSTM), introducing no new blind spots. The detection models port across domains. So do their biases, and so do their blind spots.

Keywords

OWASP, insider threat detection, cross-domain transfer, MITRE ATLAS, UBFS, AI agent monitoring, anomaly detection, AI governance

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green