In 2023, an armed Auckland CBD worker entered his workspace where other employees assumed they were safe and secure. Two people died.

That is the reality of insider threat: the highest-risk person often sits inside the system with routine access and minimal oversight.

Organisations often secure the outside, yet most real harm starts inside. Routine, comfort, and missed threats hide the early signals. This is why organisational guardianship matters.

Guardianship is the security discipline of spotting behavioural shifts early, strengthening supervisors, and connecting wellbeing, HR and security intelligence. It closes the gap between what policy says and what people actually do. Importantly, guardianship isn’t surveillance, it’s proactive visibility where the real risk sits: people, access, and culture.

Technical controls keep outsiders out, but they do little against someone with a swipe card, site knowledge and a grievance. Most insider events show clear indicators, stress, withdrawal, conflict, boundary-pushing, unusual access patterns. Organisations that prevent harm are the ones that notice these changes early and act.

Failures usually come from cultural avoidance, overconfidence in controls, poor supervision, and HR/security silos. In hindsight, insider incidents look obvious. In reality, the organisation just wasn’t looking.

Leaders shape the outcome. When executives probe internal exposure, confront comfort-driven blind spots, enable early intervention, and recognise that security culture is the foundation of a healthy workplace culture, vulnerability drops and resilience grows.

Spectre helps organisations embed guardianship into their protective security model by mapping insider exposure, surfacing pressure points, integrating predictive intelligence and taking a systems approach to building a mature security culture — the most powerful security control any organisation can have.

By Owen Loeffellechner

Link to Original Article

Photo: Matthew Scott, Newsroom