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Insider Threat Awareness Month (NITAM) takes place every September to help government and industry recognize insider risks and strengthen the programs that address them. AI does not make an employee—or an AI system—an insider threat by itself. It does make access management more important: organizations need to know what people and software agents are authorized to reach, what they can do, and how their activity is reviewed.
What is Insider Threat Awareness Month?
NITAM is an annual September campaign focused on educating government and industry about insider-threat risks and the role of insider-threat programs. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) launched the 2024 campaign under the theme “Deter. Detect. Mitigate.” (NCSC’s September 3, 2024 release)
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DCSA’s NITAM campaign page, updated for 2026, offers awareness resources and encourages organizations to promote awareness, train personnel, support reporting, and establish an operational hub or equivalent response function. The page does not identify AI as the 2026 campaign theme.
What counts as an insider threat?
An insider threat involves a person with authorized access who uses that access—intentionally or unintentionally—in a way that could harm an organization or its resources. Potential harms include espionage, cyber intrusion, unauthorized disclosure, theft, sabotage, and workplace violence, according to NCSC’s 2024 campaign release.
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The definition is about the harmful use of access, not a person’s job title or a single suspicious-looking moment. NCSC says many threats show concerning behavior before harmful workplace events and that early identification can allow mitigation. This is qualitative guidance, not a rule for predicting who will cause harm. Stress, disagreement, or one unusual action alone is not proof of malicious intent.
How does AI change insider-risk questions?
The basic security concerns remain familiar: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. NIST describes AI system security in those terms, including protection of systems and their training and output data. Its AI security and resilience work also includes AI control overlays that are in development.
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AI agents add an access-management question. A software agent may be granted access to data sets, tools, or applications and then act through those permissions. NIST’s February 5, 2026 concept-paper announcement identifies agent identification, authorization, auditing, non-repudiation, and prompt-injection controls as topics for its project.
NIST describes this as a concept paper for a potential project, not a completed standard or mandatory rule. The practical implication is to make access and accountability questions explicit whenever an organization adopts AI: what identity is acting, what it is permitted to access, and how its actions can be reviewed.
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How can organizations reduce insider risk as they adopt AI?
Make awareness and reporting practical
Explain how to recognize and report concerning behavior through established channels. Employees should know where to take a concern and what happens after they do. DCSA recommends that organizations support reporting and establish an operational hub; that hub or equivalent team needs responsibility and capacity to assess information and coordinate a response. (DCSA’s NITAM resources)
Tailor security literacy to roles
Training should cover insider-threat indicators, social engineering, and social mining, with material adapted to employees’ roles and organizational requirements. NIST sets out these security-literacy topics in SP 800-171 Rev. 3. Role-specific instruction helps employees understand the risks they are most likely to encounter and how to report them.
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Review AI-agent access and accountability
For an AI agent, examine the questions raised in NIST’s project work: how the agent is identified, what it is authorized to do, which data and applications it can reach, and whether its actions can be audited and attributed. These are useful review questions, not a finalized NIST checklist or compliance requirement. Consider them alongside the same confidentiality, integrity, and availability protections applied to other systems.
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Insider-risk programs should support early response without turning awareness into indiscriminate surveillance or profiling. NCSC says federal programs address threats while protecting workforce privacy and civil liberties, and describes insider-threat work as a shared responsibility involving organizations, security personnel, supervisors, and employees. (NCSC’s 2024 release)
What should an awareness effort accomplish?
A useful NITAM effort leaves people with clear, actionable answers: what insider threat means in their organization, which reporting route to use, who will assess a report, and how access—including access granted to AI agents—is managed and reviewed. The goal is early mitigation and harm prevention, not accusation. NITAM is an opportunity to reinforce those practices with the workforce and the teams responsible for responding.
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