The Pentagon may need machines to help stop insider threats

Preventing the next intelligence leak could be as simple as acting on a tip that a user is behaving abnormally. But sometimes those tips go unnoticed, a top defense tech official said.

“We all have some user activity monitoring tools. We have some behavior analytics already on. This is really about empowering and integrating the two together,” Gurpreet Bhatia, the Pentagon’s principal director for cybersecurity, said during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance event in Arlington, Va. on Wednesday. “If I have a tip that goes somewhere and it just sits there, and there's no action taken, it's kind of mindless.”