Insider Threats & Elicitation Methods
The course is a modern shield forged and built to expose deception and validate identity with brutal clarity. It strips away assumptions, presses for truth, and treats every interview like a counterintelligence operation. Interviewers learn to test claims under pressure, probe for inconsistencies, and force impostors off-script. Video calls aren't just chats—they're forensic tests. From liveness checks to workspace scans, no angle is left unexamined. Candidates must code live, think out loud, and adapt on the fly. Their stories are stress-tested, their voices analyzed, their timelines cross-checked. Each step is layered—psychological pressure, linguistic traps, full-screen audits, cultural nuance. Deep-fakes flicker, voice-clones stumble, coached answers collapse. Even résumés are weaponized—expanded, dissected, and used as bait. This isn't just hiring—it's human vetting at espionage depth, designed to catch what others miss.
Course Information
The body of work—including the Treadstone 71 Insider Threats Capability Maturity Model (CMM), AI-enhanced detection frameworks, traditional behavioral risk indicators, elicitation resistance methods, and deception detection protocols—constitutes proprietary intellectual property owned by Treadstone 71.
It encompasses comprehensive courseware, interview training models, simulation labs, and practical playbooks designed for operational deployment across remote, hybrid, and on-site environments. This includes the full suite of training materials for interviewers, insider threat response operations, maturity modeling, government-aligned frameworks, and cultural/geographic elicitation methodologies.
Integrated across these materials are advanced methods for identifying insider risk—spanning psychological indicators, behavioral telemetry, live video deception resistance, AI/ML-enhanced analytics, and stylometric profiling. Playbooks, indicators, red-flag signposts, and assessment metrics are included to support practitioner readiness and organizational maturity scaling.
The content is aligned with federal standards (CISA, ODNI, DHS, NIST), designed for cross-functional integration, and delivered via modular curricula tailored for technical, HR, legal, and executive roles.
Insider Threats and Elicitation Methods
Part 1- Foundations of Insider Threats
- Introduction to Insider Threats
- Historic Shifts and Organizational Blind Spots
- Definition Models of Insider Threats
- Core Characteristics of Insider Threat Behavior
- Modern Insider Threat Drivers Across Environments
- Insider Access Versus Insider Risk
- Identifying Psychological Indicators of Insider Risk
- Risk Amplification in Remote and Hybrid Environments
- Digital Forensics of Insider Breaches
- Mitigation and Resilience Engineering
- Strategic Pillars
- Prevention First
- Behavioral Intelligence
- Continuous Validation
- Feedback and Resilience
Part 2- Advanced Interviewing and Detection Techniques
- Insider Threat Interview Protocols
- Deception Detection in Remote Interviews
- Behavioral Elicitation Techniques
- Real-Time Technical Verification Methods
- Legal, Ethical, and Privacy Constraints in Interviews
- Simulation-Based Interviewer Training
- Live Interview Analysis and Debrief Loops
- Stylometric and Phonetic Analysis
Part 3- Government Frameworks and Compliance
- CISA Insider Threat Guide – Objectives and Implementation
- ODNI Maturity Framework – Application and Scaling
- National Insider Threat Policy – Core Concepts and Practices
- DHS Insider Threat Model – Civil Sector Adaptation
Part 4- Insider Threat Maturity Models
- Introduction to Maturity Models
- Governance, Process, and Technical Maturity
- Five-Tier Model- From Ad Hoc to Optimized
- Benchmarking with the Treadstone 71 Insider Threat CMM
- Tailoring by Organization Type
- Building and Tracking a Maturity Roadmap
- Real-World Lessons and Failures
Part 5- Insider Threat Response Operations
- Importance of Response Protocols
- Five Phases- Detection, Containment, Investigation, Communication, Recovery
- Command Roles and Escalation Flows
- Threat Classification and Activation Triggers
- Centralized vs. Distributed Response Models
- Technical Responses- Access Revocation, GitOps, EDR, Privilege Suspension
- Forensic Protocols and Chain-of-Custody
- Red Team Exercises and Live Incident Drills
Part 6- Organizational Resilience and Continuous Improvement
- Insider Threat Fatigue and Alert Precision
- Behavioral Drift and Sensor Degradation
- Post-Mortem Feedback Integration
- Blue Team Evolution from Red Team Data
- Localization and Geo-Cultural Sensitivity in Detection
- Federated vs. Central Governance
- Adaptive Interview Flag Tuning
- Simulation Feedback Loops and Metrics
Elicitation Techniques – Extracting Truth, Revealing Deception
Learning Objectives-
- Understand the psychological basis of elicitation in high-risk interviews.
- Identify conversational tactics to surface inconsistencies and stress responses.
- Apply real-time elicitation during technical and behavioral interviews without alerting the subject.
Topics Covered-
- Strategic Use of Elicitation
- Aligning elicitation goals with threat intelligence requirements.
- Mapping elicitation to specific threat actor archetypes and recruitment patterns.
- Indirect Questioning and Cultural Traps
- Techniques to extract geolocation verification through commuter trivia, local holidays, and slang.
- Injecting open-ended cultural questions subtly tied to claimed background.
- Behavioral Probes and Stress Injection
- Using STAR-based storytelling under pressure.
- Midstream scenario shifts to test adaptability and memory integrity.
- Verbal traps using past project details or timeline verification.
- Phonetic and Linguistic Cues
- Eliciting regional speech markers (e.g., vowel length, retroflex consonants).
- Measuring hesitation, latency, and response precision under spontaneous questioning.
- Live Identity Challenges
- Prompting workspace camera sweeps and reflection checks.
- Real-time liveness tasks embedded in casual conversation (e.g., reading sticky notes, screen navigation).
- Elicitation During Technical Tasks
- Verbal walkthroughs while debugging unfamiliar code.
- Justification challenges- “Why that tool?”, “Who was on that team?”, “Show that commit.”
- Elicitation Failures and Indicators
- Recognizing scripted patterns, overly polished answers, or timeline vagueness.
- Measuring pronoun stability, specificity index, and false memory injection.
- Feedback Loops
- Post-interview scoring against elicitation performance.
- Updating elicitation prompts based on red-team feedback and real-world deception cases.
Your Instructor
Treadstone 71 is a woman and veteran-owned small business exclusively focused on cyber and threat intelligence consulting, services, and training. We are a pure-play intelligence shop.
Training dates and locations here
Since 2002, Treadstone 71 delivers intelligence training, strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence consulting, and research. We provide a seamless extension of your organization efficiently and effectively moving your organization to cyber intelligence program maturity. Our training, established in 2008, follows intelligence community standards as applied to the ever-changing threat environment delivering forecasts and estimates as intelligence intends. From baseline research to adversary targeted advisories and dossiers, Treadstone 71 products align with your intelligence requirements. We do not follow the create once and deliver many model. We contextually tie our products to your needs. Intelligence is our only business.
- We use intuition, structured techniques, and years of experience.
- We supply intelligence based on clearly defined requirements.
- We do not assign five people to do a job only one with experience.
- We do not bid base bones only to change order you to overspending.
We are known for our ability to:
- Anticipate key target or threat activities that are likely to prompt a leadership decision.
- Aid in coordinating, validating, and managing collection requirements, plans, and activities.
- Monitor and report changes in threat dispositions, activities, tactics, capabilities, objectives as related to designated cyber operations warning problem sets.
- Produce timely, fused, all-source cyber operations intelligence and indications and warnings intelligence products (e.g., threat assessments, briefings, intelligence studies, country studies).
- Provide intelligence analysis and support to designated exercises, planning activities, and time-sensitive operations.
- Develop or recommend analytic approaches or solutions to problems and situations for which information is incomplete or no precedent exists.
- Recognize and mitigate deception in reporting and analysis.
Assess intelligence, recommend targets to support operational objectives. - Assess target vulnerabilities and capabilities to determine a course of action.
- Assist in the development of priority information requirements.
- Enable synchronization of intelligence support plans across the supply chain.
- ...and Review and understand organizational leadership objectives and planning guidance non-inclusively.