Consistent Enforcement of Minor Violations

The subject deliberately pushes or tests organizational policies, rules, or controls to assess tolerance levels, detect oversight gaps, or gain a sense of impunity. While initial actions may appear minor or exploratory, boundary testing serves as a psychological and operational precursor to more serious misconduct.

Characteristics

• Motivated by curiosity, challenge-seeking, or early-stage dissatisfaction.
• Actions often start small: minor policy violations, unauthorized accesses, or circumvention of procedures.
• Rationalizations include beliefs that policies are overly rigid, outdated, or unfair.
• Boundary testing behavior may escalate if it is unchallenged, normalized, or inadvertently rewarded.
• Subjects often seek to gauge the likelihood and severity of consequences before considering larger or riskier actions.
• Testing may be isolated or gradually evolve into opportunism, retaliation, or deliberate harm.

Example Scenario

A subject repeatedly circumvents minor IT security controls (e.g., bypassing content filters, using personal devices against policy) without immediate consequences. Encouraged by the lack of enforcement, the subject later undertakes unauthorized data transfers, rationalizing the behavior based on perceived inefficiencies and low risk of detection.

Authentication credentials, including passwords, API keys, and tokens are stored in unmanaged locations outside the scope of enterprise access governance. These may include plain text documents, spreadsheets, shared folders, configuration files, or personal notes. These storage locations are not subject to audit, version control, or policy enforcement, and often fall outside of privileged access management (PAM) or identity and access management (IAM) systems.

Unmanaged credential storage creates a latent security condition in which one or more subjects may be able to retrieve high-privilege credentials without generating any access logs or triggering control workflows. In many cases, these credentials are reused across systems, are not rotated, and are inconsistently protected. This creates durable risk, especially in environments where entitlement reviews do not include stored credentials as an exposure category.

The presence of unmanaged credentials increases the feasibility of lateral movement, privilege escalation, and untraceable access to sensitive systems. Investigators should treat the existence of untracked or insecurely stored credentials as an enabling factor when reconstructing access conditions for an infringement. Their presence also indicates control breakdowns that may permit future abuse or support behavioral drift within privileged roles.

A subject can write to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device outside the organization’s control. In remote or hybrid settings, the subject’s ability to access NAS devices on their personal LAN — from a corporate-managed endpoint — introduces a persistent and often unmonitored risk vector.

These consumer-grade platforms (e.g., Synology, QNAP, WD My Cloud) fall outside the scope of organizational governance, yet remain fully accessible when the subject is working from home. If reachable, they provide a standing means to stage, duplicate, or transfer sensitive enterprise data.

This capability is particularly dangerous when VPN configurations permit split tunneling, unintentionally allowing local subnet access alongside corporate resources. Even in the absence of deliberate misuse, the continued accessibility of these unmanaged file-sharing services expands the subject’s technical means and circumvention potential.

An organization entrusts a Managed Service Provider (MSP) with administrative or operational access to its digital environment - typically for IT support, system maintenance, or development functions. This access is often persistent, privileged, and spans sensitive infrastructure or data environments.

The means is established when MSP personnel, including potential subjects, are permitted to authenticate into the client’s environment from systems or networks entirely outside the client's visibility or jurisdiction. These MSP endpoints may be unmanaged, unmonitored, or physically located in regions where customer organization's policies, incident response authority, or legal recourse do not apply.

This creates an unobservable access channel: the subject operates from infrastructure beyond the reach of the customer organization's logging, endpoint detection, or identity correlation. The organization is therefore unable to monitor or verify who accessed what, when, or from where—rendering all downstream actions unauditable by the customer organization's internal security teams, unless mirrored within the client-controlled environment.

The exposure can be compounded by the MSP’s internal controls (or lack thereof). Weak credential custody practices, shared administrative accounts, inadequate background checks, or poor workforce segmentation create conditions where privileged misuse or unauthorized access can occur without attribution or immediate detection. The subject does not require escalation—they begin with sanctioned access and operate under delegated trust, often without the constraints applied to internal staff.

This structural dependency - privileged access held externally, without enforceable oversight - creates the necessary conditions for an insider infringement to occur with low risk of interruption or accountability.

The subject exploits circumstances for personal gain, convenience, or advantage, often without premeditation or major malicious intent. Opportunistic acts typically arise from perceived gaps in oversight, immediate personal needs, or desires, rather than long-term ideological, financial, or revenge-driven motivations.

Characteristics

• Motivated by immediate self-interest rather than deep-seated grievance or ideology.
• May rationalize actions as minor, justified, or harmless ("no one will notice," "this helps everyone," "it's not a big deal").
• Often triggered by environmental factors such as poor oversight, operational stress, or unmet personal needs.
• May escalate over time if not detected and corrected early.
• Subjects often do not view themselves as "threat actors" and may retain a positive view of their organization.
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Example Scenario

Senior enlisted personnel on a U.S. Navy warship collaborated to procure and install unauthorized satellite internet equipment (Starlink) to improve their onboard quality of life. Acting without command approval, they circumvented Navy IT security protocols, introducing significant operational security (OPSEC) risks. Their motive was personal convenience rather than espionage, sabotage, or financial gain.

Passwords, API keys, and privileged credentials are communicated, stored, or embedded in service desk tickets, including incident responses, change management notes, and administrative work orders. These credentials are often entered by IT or support personnel as part of access restoration, environment configuration, or user provisioning workflows.

Because many service desk platforms (such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice & Zendesk) are broadly accessible across IT, engineering, and sometimes third-party vendor teams, the storage of credentials in ticketing systems significantly expands the number of individuals who can retrieve operationally sensitive access. In many cases, ticket logs are not considered part of the formal audit surface for access control, and standard retention, encryption, or obfuscation policies are inconsistently applied.

When credentials are available through searchable tickets, any subject with sufficient access to the service desk platform may bypass formal access provisioning and review processes. This creates an unmonitored path to privilege, especially when ticket histories are long-lived and tied to high-value systems. Investigators should treat such platforms as latent access repositories, especially during retrospective analysis of system access or in cases where no formal credential use appears in logs.